Capacity and Variability Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol

Abstract—Packet error in the IEEE 802.11 network is one source of performance degradation and its variability. Most of the previous works study how collision avoidance and hidden adding��Ï¡Ô� by¡Ô� terminals affect 802.11 performance metrics, such as probability of a collision and saturation throughput. In this paper we focus on the effect of packet errors on capacity and variability of the 802.11 MAC protocol. We develope a new analytical model, calledÔ�-Model, by extending the existing model (Tay and Chua’s model) to incorporate packet error probabilityÔ�. WithÔ�-Model, we successfully analyze capacity and variability of the 802.11 MAC protocol. The variability analysis shows that increasing packet error probability has more effect on saturation throughput, tha