Linear Approximation Model Throughput Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordinated Function in Wireless Lossy Channel

Abstract

One source of performance degradation in wireless networks is the frame error that occurs because of nonideal channel conditions. Most previous works assume an ideal transmission channel (i.e., no error in transmission), whereas other works assume that the error is constant and exists only in data packets. These previous works do not consider transmission errors in control frames (i.e., RTS, CTS, and ACK). Therefore, this paper proposes an analytical approximation model to computes the saturation throughput, conditional collision probability, and packet transmission probability, of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) in the presence of a determinate number of nodes (n) and a wireless noise channel condition. The transmission error that occurs in the data packets and control frames are considered for the computation of the saturation throughput. Furthermore, the effect of network size (n), maximum backoff stage (m), packet length, and minimum backoff window size (W) on the saturation throughput is investigated. The results indicate that the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF strongly depends on number of nodes, packet length, and BER.