Performance analysis of MAC layer protocols in the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

In recent years, WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard have been taken a growing interest and developed widely all over the world. CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) protocols are the most popular MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols for WLANs. The performance of CSMA/CA protocols over wireless channels has been investigated over the past years. In this paper, we obtain the probability distribution function of the MAC layer packet service time, and we present the comprehensive performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol by investigating the queue dynamics of a wireless station based on the MAC layer packet service time. We adopt an MMPP(Markov Modulated Poisson Process) as the input traffic model that describes well the bursty nature of Internet traffic. The analysis on the throughput and the delay performance has been carried out by using the MMPP/G/1/K queueing model. We have some numerical results that represent the system throughput and the queue dynamics including the mean packet waiting time and packet blocking probability.