Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11a in non-saturation conditions

The maximum nominal data rate specified in IEEE 802.11a is up to 54Mbps. However, in practice, we find that the data rate which users can get is much lower than that. In order to accurately evaluate the ability of IEEE 802.11a to support data services, we improve the existing two-dimensional Markov chain models of the backoff window scheme, and analyze the efficiency of the IEEE 802.11a standard for wireless LANs in non-saturation conditions from the perspective of framing efficiency and MAC layer channel transport efficiency in this paper. Specifically, we derive an analytical formula for the protocol actual throughput. The proposed model and the analytical results will help researchers to further study how to predict and optimize the system performance.