On the Performance Behavior of IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function

The basis of the Medium Access Control (MAC), proposed in IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless local area networks, is the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). DCF uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) to resolve contention between wireless stations and to verify successful transmissions. In this work we present an analytical model of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol validated by simulation results for the DCF throughput, for both packet transmission schemes employed by DCF, the basic access and the RTS/CTS access mechanism. Moreover, we depict the saturation throughput and the average packet delay for 1, 5.5 and 11 Mbps in order to highlight the effect of the bit rate on network performance for both mechanisms.