Delay analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DCF

Abstract

With the rising popularity of delay-sensitive real-time multimedia applications (video, voice, data) in wireless local area networks (WLANs), it is becoming important to study the delay performance of WLANs. When the medium access control (MAC) protocol is taken into consideration, the access contention delay is a key problem. In this paper, based on a Markov model, we analyze delay performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). In addition, through extensive simulations, we calculate the delay performance of both basic access and RTS/CTS access mechanism of the 802.11 protocol.