An Easy Way for 802.11DCF Performance Analysis

To simplify the performance analysis of IEEE 802.11DCF in a saturated wireless LAN environment, a simple box-ball model is proposed. It regards the problem of packet transmission collisions as throwing some balls into several boxes randomly and independently. Balls are equal to the number of active nodes and boxes are related to the average contention window of each node. When two or more balls happen to fall into the same box, it means a collision would occur when the corresponding time slot arrives. In concern of limited retransmissions for every packet, the state transform of transmitting node is approximated as a finite-state one-dimension Markovian process. A simple method is finally proposed to evaluate the capacity of 802.11DCF based on the concepts of virtual transmission period and average contention window. Simulation results validate the analysis.