Analytical Analysis of IEEE 802.11 MAC

Vikas Pachisia, Annappa

Abstract: The most important parameters of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, which can help to improve its performance, are collision time, idle time, and number of collisions. In this paper we try to find the contention window size that will make the WLAN operate in the steady state. We find the optimal contention window (CW) only via mathematical equations. It is observed that by proper selection of the contention window size, the network performance can be improved as the network load increases.

Keywords: Poisson distribution, Backoff Tuned channel access mechanism, collision time, idle time