Saturation Performance of IEEE 802.11 Broadcast Networks

In this letter, saturation performance of broadcast service in IEEE 802.11 is studied analytically and by simulation. Having investigated the features of the broadcast service, we point out that the analytic models for saturation performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11 unicast communication cannot be simply reduced for analysis of broadcast service. Under realistic assumptions, we construct an analytic model to characterize operation of the backoff counter for broadcast, thus obtain closed form solutions to the saturation throughput and packet delivery ratio. Simulation validates the proposed model. Numerical results reveal characteristics of the broadcast service.