Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF with stochastic reward nets

In this paper, we present a performance study to evaluate the mean delay and the average system throughput of IEEE 802.11‐based wireless local area networks (WLANs). We consider the distributed co‐ordination function (DCF) mode of medium access control (MAC). Stochastic reward nets (SRNs) are used as a modelling formalism as it readily captures the synchronization between events in the DCF mode of access. We present a SRN‐based analytical model to evaluate the mean delay and the average system throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF by considering an on–off traffic model and taking into account the freezing of the back‐off counter due to channel capture by other stations. We also compute the mean delay suffered by a packet in the system using the SRN formulation and by modelling each station as an M/G/1 queue. We validate our analytical model by comparison with simulations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.