Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF with stochastic reward nets

Abstract

In this paper, we present a performance study to evaluate the mean delay and the average system throughput of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs). We consider the distributed coordination function (DCF) mode of medium access control (MAC). Stochastic reward nets (SRNs) are used as a modelling formalism as it readily captures the synchronization between events in the DCF mode of access. We present a SRN-based analytical model to evaluate the mean delay and the average system throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF by considering an on-off traffic model and taking into account the freezing of the back-off counter due to channel capture by other stations. We also compute the mean delay suffered by a packet in the system using the SRN formulation and by modelling each station as an M/G/1 queue. We validate our analytical model by comparison with simulations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.