Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF in Non-saturated Conditions

The IEEE 802.11 standard defines the physical layer and media access control(MAC) layer for a wireless LAN and this standard is largely being deployed. The primary MAC technique of 802.11 is a random access scheme based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance(CSMA/CA) protocol and is called distributed coordination function(DCF). We propose a Markov model for the behavior of a given station governed by DCF under non-saturated traffic conditions and evaluate the channel throughput. We validate the accuracy of the proposed model through simulation.