Improving the Throughput in Lightly Disturbed IEEE 802.11 DCF Saturated Network Using the Fragmentation Mechanism Under Basic Access Mode

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 is the most dominating protocol in the wireless local area networks and in which, the fundamental mechanism to access the channel is called distributed coordination function (DCF). As this mechanism is random, the calculation of the performance metrics for IEEE 802.11 networks is focused on the determination of probabilities such as collision probability and successful transmission probability. Recently, there are performance studies in the literature are based on the mathematical models developed using the Markov chains, which model the DCF mechanism with fragmentation in IEEE 802.11 network under imperfect channel. Yet, these models suffer with high collision probability and low successful transmission probability and as a result, the transmission with fragmentation is not recommended at all in the IEEE 802.11 basic DCF networks when the bit error rate is low $$\left( {BER < 5 \times 10^{ - 5} } \right)$$ . In order to solve this, a new analytical model of the basic DCF mechanism with fragmentation is presented in this paper to accurately evaluate throughput metric in the lightly disturbed IEEE 802.11 network at $$BER = 10^{ - 5}$$ under saturated traffic. Analytical results show that our model significantly improves the throughput of the IEEE 802.11 DCF network compared with existing model and hence, provides a higher throughput than that is improved with the request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) mode, regardless to network size.