IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs: Performance Analysis and Protocol Refinement
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IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs: Performance Analysis and Protocol Refinement P. Chatzimisios Multimedia Communications Research Group, School of Design, Engineering and Computing, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset BH12 5BB, UK Email: [email protected]
A. C. Boucouvalas Multimedia Communications Research Group, School of Design, Engineering and Computing, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset BH12 5BB, UK Email: [email protected]
V. Vitsas Information Technology Department, Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, 54101 Thessaloniki, Greece Email: [email protected] Received 25 February 2004; Revised 1 November 2004; Recommended for Publication by C. C. Ko The IEEE 802.11 protocol is emerging as a widely used standard and has become the most mature technology for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we focus on the tuning of the IEEE 802.11 protocol parameters taking into consideration, in addition to throughput efficiency, performance metrics such as the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop a packet, and the packet interarrival time. We present an analysis, which has been validated by simulation that is based on a Markov chain model commonly used in the literature. We further study the improvement on these performance metrics by employing suitable protocol parameters according to the specific communication needs of the IEEE 802.11 protocol for both basic access and RTS/CTS access schemes. We show that the use of a higher initial contention window size does not considerably degrade performance in small networks and performs significantly better in any other scenario. Moreover, we conclude that the combination of a lower maximum contention window size and a higher retry limit considerably improves performance. Results indicate that the appropriate adjustment of the protocol parameters enhances performance and improves the services that the IEEE 802.11 protocol provides to various communication applications. Keywords and phrases: IEEE 802.11, wireless LANs, DCF, packet delay, protocol tuning.
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INTRODUCTION
During the past few years, the field of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has witnessed a massive development and has become one of the fastest growing areas in telecommunications and networking [1]. Continuing advances in wireless technology and mobile communications have equipped portable devices with wireless capabilities that allow networked communication even while a user is mobile. WLANs have found widespread use and have become an essential tool in many people’s professional and personal life. To satisfy the This is an open-access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
growing needs of wireless data networking, the IEEE working group proposed the 802.11 protocol family [2].
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