Capacity and Variability Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol

Packet error in the IEEE 802.11 network is one source of performance degradation and its variability. Most of the previous works study how collision avoidance and hidden terminals affect 802.11 performance metrics, such as probability of a collision and saturation throughput. In this paper we focus on the effect of packet errors on capacity and variability of the 802.11 MAC protocol. We develope a new analytical model, called pe-Model, by extending the existing model (Tay and Chua’s model) to incorporate packet error probability pe. With pe-Model, we successfully analyze capacity and variability of the 802.11 MAC protocol. The variability analysis shows that increasing packet error probability by pe has more effect on saturation throughput, than adding 0:5W pe stations, where W is the minimum contention window size, We also show the numerical validation of pe-Model with 802.11 MAC-level simulator.