Investigation of the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC)

Analysis of the drafi IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standard is needed to characterize the expected performance of the standard’s ad hoc and infrastructure networks. The performance of the medium access control (MAC) sublayer, which consists of Distributed Coordtnatton Function (DCF) and Point Coordination Function (PCF), is determined by simulating asynchronous data trajjic in a 1 Mbps ad hoc network, and asynchronous data and packe tized voice trafic in a 1 Mbps infrastructure network. The simulation models incorporate the effect of burst errors, packet size, RTS threshold and fragmentation threshold on network throughput and delay. The results show that the IEEE 802.11 WLAN can achieve a reasonably high eficaency when the medium is almost error-free, but may degrade appreciably under harsh fadtng. The results also show that time-s ensttive traffic such as packet voice can be supported together with other zntenstve trafic such as packet data. However, an echo canc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Brian P. Crow, Indra Widjaja, Jeong Geun Kim, Prescott Sakai
• Keywords: Ad Hoc, Communications, IEEE 802.11, INFOCOM 1997, Infrastructure Network