802.11 LANs: Saturation throughput in the presence of noise

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 specifies a technology for wireless local area networks (LANs) and mobile networking. In this paper, we present an analytical method of estimating the saturation throughput of 802.11 wireless LAN in the presence of noise which distorts transmitted frames. Besides the Basic Access mechanism of the 802.11 MAC protocol, we study such optional tool as the RTS/CTS method, which allows reducing the influence of collisions. In addition to the throughput, our method allows estimating a probability of a packet rejection occurring when the number of packet transmission retries attains its limit. The obtained numerical results of investigating 802.11 LANs by this method are validated by simulation and show high estimation accuracy for any values of protocol parameters and bit error rates. These results also show that the method is an effective tool for tuning the protocol parameters.