The performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11 DCF using Markov chain model for wireless LANs

• The channel busy conditions in ZA’s model was first modified via Markov chain model.
• It presents more accurate studies regarding as DCF throughput.
• The results show that our model has a better performance than the ZA’s model.

During the past few years the widespread use of the wireless local area networks (WLANs) communication technique is one of the most popular technologies in data telecommunications and networking. The IEEE 802.11 protocol has achieved worldwide acceptance with WLANs with minimum management and maintenance costs. The theoretical performance and numerical results in terms of saturation throughput and delay of distributed coordination function (DCF) were finished by Ziouva and Antonakopoulous. It took into account of the busy medium conditions and how they affected the use of the backoff mechanism. However, the definition of their proposed channel busy probability is not suitable for the operating system architecture. In this paper, the channel busy conditions is modified and the Ziouva and Antonakopoulous's (ZA's) model is improved, and the more accurate analyses of the DCF are presented. Our analysis is also extended to the computation of the delay performance of both the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) and basic access mechanisms. The numerical results show that the modified model has better performance than the ZA's model under ideal channel scenario.