Optimizing frequency domain contention in wireless network

Wireless communication became popular in the last decades, giving the mobility to the users. However with increased number of users and contention, network efficiency can hardly keep up with user needs. This thesis focuses on a new frequency domain contention technique called FICA. In FICA, the channel is assumed to be using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) with multiple sub-carriers. We investigated the use of multiple channels and multiple access points (APs) in the design. First we investigated having one channel that is divided into number of sub-carriers, it shows good result, but only for limited number of users. Therefore we worked on the second scenario of having several sub-channels and each sub-channel is divided into a number of sub-carriers to communicate through one AP. And for efficient result nodes contend on the contention band and winner nodes will have the chance to send their data through the transmission band. In real world, networks have more than one AP, for that reason we investigate the third scenario, which is having more than one AP. In this setup, the result showed significant outcome, that we can divide the channel into several sub-channels to serve more than one AP and hash an ID for each AP. We further investigated optimal number of ID bits that are used to represent the hashed receiver IDs. We summarize the results as following: 1) it is possible to divide the channel bandwidth into several sub-channels that is divided into several sub-carriers to serve large number of users. 2) node contention should be partitioned into contention band and transmission band to reduce the overhead that the contending node cause when contending on the whole channel. 3) AP ID is required when the network has more than one AP. 4) number of sub-carriers in the contention band has to increase at least to the double for higher efficiency, since more AP on the network would make the channel more loaded. 5) AP ID can be anything between 20-40 bits. Decreasing the ID to less than 40bits did not affect the throughput and efficiency of the channel