Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF in binary symmetric channels

IEEE 802.11 is the most important standard for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In IEEE 802.11, the fundamental medium access control (MAC) scheme is distributed coordination function (DCF), whose performance has been studied analytically in the literature. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no accurate model that takes into account both the incoming traffic loads and the effect of bit transmission errors, which, in addition to collision, can also result in unsuccessful packet delivery. In this paper, we address this issue and provide a new analytical model to evaluate the performance of DCF in binary symmetric channels (BSCs). In our study, we consider the impact of different factors together, including the binary exponential backoff mechanism in DCF, various incoming traffic loads, distribution of incoming packet size, queueing system at the MAC layer, and the packet transmission errors, which has never been done before. Extensive simulation and analysis results show that our analytical model can accurately predict the delay and throughput performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF under different traffic and transmission error conditions. © 2005 IEEE.