A Performance Analysis of the 802.11 Wireless Lan Medium Access Control

Abstract

We study the performance of the IEEE 802.11 protocol. We present an extension of a methodology for the collocated one-hop case which allows the incorporation of channel errors. The results closely agree with simulation results. A delay analysis is also presented. We also present an extension of this methodology to the multi-hop case with non-collocated nodes. The approach uses specific topology dependent relations. Specific results are presented for the ring and mesh topologies, and compared against simulation results.