—Performance of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) has been studied by several authors under steady-state conditions. Behavior of DCF under transient state conditions and its modeling is important for analyzing several scenarios, such as, initialization of nodes in a wireless ad hoc network. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for IEEE 802.11 DCF to capture its behavior under transient as well as steady state conditions. Numerical results obtained from our model have been shown to be in agreement with results published in [5] under steady-state conditions.