Performance of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Lan Medium Access Control Protocol Under Error and Error-Free Conditions

Abstract

This research uses simulation to investigate the performance of the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network standard considering both the behavior of the medium access control (MAC) protocol and the effect of burst errors in the channel. Throughput and queue lengths are examined for varying offered traffic, numbers of stations, frame lengths, and error probabilities. Results indicate that, independent of errors, higher network throughput is achieved if the aggregate work load is distributed over more stations, up to a point where excessive collisions due to a large number of stations dominates performance. Bit errors do reduce throughput, but their effect is coupled with frame length. For low bit error rates, the best performance is achieved using maximum size frames. However, for high bit error rates, the best performance is achieved using small frames.