Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: How Penalty Leads to Improvement: a Measurement Study of Wireless
  Backoff   Despite much theoretical work, different modifications of backoff protocols
in 802.11 networks lack empirical evidence demonstrating their real-life
performance. To fill the gap we have set out to experiment with performance of
exponential backoff by varying its backoff factor. Despite the satisfactory
results for throughput, we have witnessed poor fairness manifesting in severe
capture effect. The design of standard backoff protocol allows already
successful nodes to remain successful, giving little chance to those nodes that
failed to capture the channel in the beginning. With this at hand, we ask a
conceptual question: Can one improve the performance of wireless backoff by
introducing a mechanism of self-penalty, when overly successful nodes are
penalized with big contention windows? Our real-life measurements using
commodity hardware demonstrate that in many settings such mechanism not only
allows to achieve better throughput, but also assures nearly perfect fairness.
We further corroborate these results with simulations and an analytical model.
Finally, we present a backoff factor selection protocol which can be
implemented in access points to enable deployment of the penalty backoff
protocol to consumer devices.

28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga