Throughput Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function Considering Erroneous Channel and Capture Effects

This paper presents a performance study of the distributed coordination function (DCF) of 802.11 networks considering erroneous channel and capture effects under non-saturated traffic conditions employing a basic access method. The aggregate throughput of a practical wireless local area network (WLAN) strongly depends on the channel conditions. In a real radio environment, the received signal power at the access point from a station is subjected to deterministic path loss, shadowing, and fast multipath fading. The binary exponential backoff (BEB) mechanism of IEEE 802.11 DCF severely suffers from more channel idle time under high bit error rate (BER). To alleviate the low performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF, a new mechanism is introduced, which greatly outperforms the existing methods under a high BER. A multidimensional Markov chain model is used to characterize the behavior of DCF in order to account both non-ideal channel conditions and capture effects.