Impact of bursty error rates on the performance of wireless local area network (WLAN)

With an increasing popularity of DCF based wireless LAN, the modeling of 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) has attracted lots of research attention. Existing analysis of 802.11 DCF has been focused on the determination of the throughput and the packet delay under saturated traffic and ideal channel conditions. Although some recent papers address the saturated performance under a simple uniform error model, they can hardly capture the impact of bursty characteristics of wireless fading on the performance of 802.11 DCF. This paper presents exact formulae for the throughput and the delay in DCF for various traffic conditions when either saturated or unsaturated traffic load is present. A two-state Markov channel model is incorporated to present the bursty characteristics of channel errors. With our analysis, the impact of bursty channel error on unsuccessful transmission probability and the DCF performance can be determined. The results of our analytical framework reveal that the four-way handshaking scheme does not improve throughput substantially for light traffic load. However, for heavy traffic load, the four-way handshaking scheme is advantageous as compared to the basic access scheme. Also, extensive simulation is done to substantiate the accuracy of our analytical model.