A new adaptive differentiated p-persistent CSMA protocol that reduces the effect of the transmission errors on the system throughput performance

Abstract

With the rapid development of 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) and the need for better quality of service (QoS) the 802.11e MAC with service differentiation was developed. Analysing the effect of transmission errors on the performance of 802.11 is a fundamental consideration in practical situations since the wireless channels are error-prone. This paper modifies the p-persistent CSMA protocol with multiple traffic types into a more accurate and practical model that takes into account the transmission errors when different traffic types experience different packet error rates. A new adaptive p-persistent protocol is presented that can reduce the effect of the transmission errors on the system throughput performance. The results show that transmission errors degrade the throughput performance by up to 62%. The adaptive p-persistent CSMA protocol alleviates the effect of this channel impairment and improves the throughput performance by 20%.