A study on the influence of transmission errors on WLAN IEEE 802.11 MAC performance

Since the advent of the first IEEE 802.11 standard for WLANs, several papers have been presented that evaluate the IEEE 802.11 DCF access method. In realistic WLAN environments frame errors usually occur due to non-ideal channel conditions; in this way, papers including adverse transmission conditions in the evaluation have been published later in the literature. In this paper, we review existent analytical models that include the influence of transmission errors in IEEE 802.11 DCF performance. We modify current models and provide a more accurate analysis, thus allowing the evaluation in single rate and multi-rate scenarios with stations subject to different link error conditions. Moreover, this paper exposes the unfairness problem that arises in IEEE 802.11 DCF networks with stations subject to different transmission conditions through analytical and simulation results. Stations are not able to distinguish collisions from failed transmissions due to link errors; both result in a missing ACK and, consequently, the transmitting stations apply the exponential backoff algorithm. This fact leads to a lower performance for stations in worse transmission conditions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[1]  Periklis Chatzimisios,et al.  Revisit of fading channel characteristics in IEEE 802.11 WLANs: independent and burst transmission errors , 2006, 2006 IEEE 17th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[2]  Periklis Chatzimisios,et al.  Influence of channel BER on IEEE 802.11 DCF , 2003 .

[3]  Z. Hadzi-Velkov,et al.  Influence of burst noise channel and hidden terminals over the IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs , 1999, Gateway to 21st Century Communications Village. VTC 1999-Fall. IEEE VTS 50th Vehicular Technology Conference (Cat. No.99CH36324).

[4]  Anurag Kumar,et al.  Saturation throughput analysis of a system of interfering IEEE 802.11 WLANs , 2005, Sixth IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless Mobile and Multimedia Networks.

[5]  Pravin Varaiya,et al.  Throughput analysis of an extended service set in IEEE 802.11 , 2004, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2004. GLOBECOM '04..

[6]  T. S. Randhawa,et al.  Saturation throughput analysis of IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed coordination function , 2004, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[7]  Haitao Wu,et al.  Performance of reliable transport protocol over IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN: analysis and enhancement , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[8]  Vladimir M. Vishnevsky,et al.  1 LANs: Saturation Throughput in the Presence of Noise , 2002, NETWORKING.

[9]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  Modeling and analysis of slow CW decrease IEEE 802.11 WLAN , 2003, 14th IEEE Proceedings on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, 2003. PIMRC 2003..

[10]  Guoqiang Mao,et al.  Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF with Data Rate Switching , 2007, IEEE Communications Letters.

[11]  Tianlin Wang,et al.  Network performance analysis on IEEE 802.11g with different protocols and signal to noise ratio values , 2005, Second IFIP International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications Networks, 2005. WOCN 2005..

[12]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Performance anomaly of 802.11b , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[13]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Evaluating Wireless LAN Access Methods in Presence of Transmission Errors , 2006, INFOCOM 2006.

[14]  Vasileios Vitsas,et al.  Performance Analysis of the Advanced Infrared (AIr) CSMA/CA MAC Protocol for Wireless LANs , 2003, Wirel. Networks.

[15]  Takeshi Onizawa,et al.  An evaluation scheme of cell throughput for multi-rate wireless LAN systems with CSMA/CA , 2003, 2003 IEEE 58th Vehicular Technology Conference. VTC 2003-Fall (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37484).

[16]  Lianfen Huang,et al.  Modeling and analysis of WLAN with interfering APS , 2004, Proceedings 7th International Conference on Signal Processing, 2004. Proceedings. ICSP '04. 2004..

[17]  Marco Conti,et al.  IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN: capacity analysis and protocol enhancement , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[18]  Ashok K. Agrawala,et al.  IEEE 802.11 DCF enhancements for noisy environments , 2004, 2004 IEEE 15th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8754).

[19]  Kang G. Shin,et al.  Goodput Analysis and Link Adaptation for IEEE 802.11a Wireless LANs , 2002, IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput..

[20]  Jiang Xie,et al.  WLC19-2: An Analytical Model for the IEEE 802.11 DCF WLAN with Multiple Co-channel Cells , 2006, IEEE Globecom 2006.

[21]  Ilenia Tinnirello,et al.  Remarks on IEEE 802.11 DCF performance analysis , 2005, IEEE Communications Letters.

[22]  Hsin-Chiao Liu,et al.  Throughput Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DCF Scheme in Multi-hop Ad Hoc Networks , 2003, International Conference on Wireless Networks.

[23]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Channel Access Unfairness of Wireless LAN Access Methods , 2007, 2007 15th IEEE Workshop on Local & Metropolitan Area Networks.

[24]  Chadi Assi,et al.  A Study on the Binary Exponential Backoff in Noisy and Heterogeneous Environment , 2007, MSN.

[25]  Sanjay Gupta,et al.  Performance modeling of asynchronous data transfer methods of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol , 1997, Wirel. Networks.

[26]  Ashok K. Agrawala,et al.  Sniffing out the correct physical layer capture model in 802.11b , 2004, Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2004. ICNP 2004..