A Simple and Comprehensive Saturation Packet Delay Model for Wireless Industrial Networks

With the emerging popularity of the wireless local area network technology, many analytical models for its main medium access control mechanism, Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), have been reported. However, most of them are based on some oversimplifying assumptions, or need very complicated mathematical manipulations. In this paper, a simple and accurate packet delay model has been proposed for the IEEE 802.11 DCF mechanism in saturated traffic and error-prone industrial applications which is based on a modified discrete-time Markov chain model of the DCF mechanism which accounts for the backoff freezing. It estimates various delay parameters including the average, jitter, Cumulative Distribution Function, and the effect of Retry Limit. The simulation results confirm the accuracy of the proposed delay model compared with other similar models in the literature.