Modeling the Short-Term Unfairness of IEEE 802.11 in Presence of Hidden Terminals

In this paper, using a simple hidden-terminal scenario, we show that IEEE 802.11 exhibits substantial short-term unfairness, though it provides long-term fairness. We analyze the short-term behavior using embedded-Markov chain method to answer the following two questions: (i) once a node gets control of the medium, what is the average number of packets this node can transmit consecutively without experiencing any collision, (ii) once a node loses its control of the medium, what is the average time the node has to wait before it gets control of the medium again. The first question reflects on how long a node can capture the medium, whereas the second question reflects on how long a node may be starved. The analytical model is validated by the simulation results. Our work is distinct from most of the work published in the literature in two aspects: we focus on the short-term behavior rather than the long-term, and the analytical method is adopted for the study.

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