Equilibrium Point Analysis of the Performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF under Poisson Packet Arrivals

The IEEE 802.11 standard has been widely deployed for wireless local area networks(WLANs) in recent years. The distributed coordination function (DCF) of 802.11 coordinates transmissions onto the shared communication channel. Under the DCF each station transmits packets depending on the channel state and its transmission packet queue. We propose a discrete time Markov model for 802.11 WLANs when packets arrive according to the Poisson process. We derive the average number of packets transmitted during a session and the channel throughput of the proposed model. Validation of the model is provided by numerical results which is corroborated by simulated examples.