Performance analysis of contending customer equipment in wireless networks

Initial ranging is the primary and important process in wireless networks for the customer premise equipments (CPEs) to access the network and establish their connections with the base station. Contention may occur during the initial ranging process. To avoid contention, the mandatory solution defined in the standards is based on a truncated binary exponential random backoff (TBERB) algorithm with a fixed initial contention window size. However, the TBERB algorithm does not take into account the possibility that the number of contended CPEs may change dynamically over time, leading to a dynamically changing collision probability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address this issue. There are three major contributions presented in this paper. First, a comprehensive analysis of initial ranging mechanisms in wireless networks is provided and initial ranging request success probability is derived based on number of contending CPEs and the initial contention window size. Second, the average ranging success delay is derived for the maximum backoff stages. It is found that the collision probability is highly dependent on the size of the initial contention window and the number of contending CPEs. To achieve the higher success probability or to reduce the collision probability among CPEs, the BS needs to adjust the initial contention window size. To keep the collision probability at a specific value for the particular number of contending CPEs, it is necessary for the BS to schedule the required size of the initial contention window to facilitate the maximum number of CPEs to establish their connections with reasonable delay. In our third contribution, the initial window size is optimized to provide the least upper bound that meets the collision probability constraint for a particular number of contending CPEs. The numerical results validate our analysis. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.