The Impact of Transmission Overheads on IEEE 802.11 Throughput: Analysis and Simulation

While various factors affecting the performance of a typical IEEE 802.11 DCF (“DCF”) medium access control (MAC) protocol, transmission overhead is one of the main causes of DCF MAC inefficiency. This paper provides an analysis of DCF overhead to show that the network throughput degrades significantly due to its high transmission overhead for a singleuser scenario. Simulation modeling is used to demonstrate the performance degradation of DCF for a multi-user network scenario. To reduce DCF’s high transmission overheads and to improve the system performance, this paper introduces a simple packet scheduling mechanism called buffer unit multiple access (BUMA). The BUMA improves the system performance because it requires less overhead to send the same amount of payload than the DCF. Results obtained show that if BUMA is used in place of DCF, the network performance is improved significantly especially under medium-to-high loads.