Performance of A Burst-Frame-Based CSMA/CA Protocol for High Data Rate Ad Hoc Networks: Unsaturated Throughput Analysis

In high data rate wireless ad hoc networks, the throughput of MAC protocols is significantly limited by the overhead such as control messages. To improve the throughput in high data rate networks, we recently proposed [1] a general framework for MAC protocols based on the well-known CSMA/CA. The key idea of this framework is to aggregate multiple upper-layer packets into a larger burst frame at the MAC layer, thus the overhead can be substantially reduced. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the unsaturated throughput performance of a burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol, which is within the framework. The uniqueness of our analytical model is that we consider both the unsaturated traffic condition and a queueing system with bulk service, in which the burst service time depends on the number of packets in the burst and depends on the channel access condition. The This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under Faculty Early Career Development Award ANI-0093241. The authors are with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL-32611, USA. Email: [email protected], [email protected], {wu, fang}@ece.ufl.edu. Please direct all correspondence to Prof. Dapeng Wu. Tel. (352) 392-4954, Fax (352) 392-0044, URL: http://www.wu.ece.ufl.edu, Email: [email protected].