Performance Modeling of a Bottleneck Node in an IEEE 802.11 Ad-Hoc Network

This paper presents a performance analysis of wireless ad-hoc networks, with ieee 802.11 as the underlying wireless lan technology. wlan has, due to the fair radio resource sharing at the mac-layer, the tendency to share the capacity equally amongst the active nodes, irrespective of their loads. An inherent drawback of this sharing policy is that a node that serves as a relay-node for multiple flows is likely to become a bottleneck. This paper proposes to model such a bottleneck by a fluid-flow model. Importantly, this is a model at the flow-level: flows arrive at the bottleneck node, and are served according to the sharing policy mentioned above. Assuming Poisson initiations of new flow transfers, we obtain insightful, robust, and explicit expressions for characteristics related to the overall flow transfer time, the buffer occupancy, and the packet delay at the bottleneck node. The analysis is enabled by a translation of the buffer dynamics at the bottleneck node in terms o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ADHOCNOW
• Authors: Hans van den Berg, Michel Mandjes, Frank Roijers
• Keywords: ADHOCNOW 2006, Bottleneck Node, Sharing Policy, Wireless Ad-hoc Networks, Wireless Networks