Performance evaluation of 802.11 broadcasts for a single cell network with unsaturated nodes

Abstract

Broadcast communication plays a critical role in ad hoc networks especially vehicular communication where a large number of applications are being envisioned to use the broadcast services of IEEE 802.11p. These safety applications exchange messages at very low rates compared to voice and streaming applications but have very stringent latency requirements. The broadcast packets undergoing collision are not retransmitted as the source cannot detect collisions, hence, obtaining the collision probability is critical for the success of applications relying on broadcast communication. In this paper, we initially assume our nodes to be bufferless and model them using a two-state Markov Chain to obtain the collision probability. We then extend our model for finite buffers to study the system under higher data traffic loads. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.