Analysis of Unsaturation Performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF with and without Slow Contention Window Decrease

Most of analytical models proposed so far for the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) focus on saturation performance. In this paper, we develop an analytic model for unsaturation performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 DCF with and without slow contention window decrease (SCWD). The model explicitly takes into account the carrier sensing mechanism and an additional backoff interval after successful frame transmission, both of which can be ignored under saturation conditions. Expressions are derived for throughput and delay characteristics by means of the equilibrium point analysis. The accuracy of our model is validated through computer simulation. Numerical results based on the IEEE 802.11b with CCK show that the SCWD can stably achieve approximately 20% performance gain over the normal 802.11 DCF under unsaturation conditions as well as saturation ones. key words: IEEE 802.11 DCF, backoff algorithm, equilibrium point analysis, throughput, transmission delay