IEEE 802.11 Saturation Throughput Analysis in the Presence of Hidden Terminals

Abstract

Due to its usefulness and wide deployment, IEEE 802.11 has been the subject of numerous studies, but still lacks a complete analytical model. Hidden terminals are common in IEEE 802.11 and cause the degradation of throughput. Despite the importance of the hidden terminal problem, there have been a relatively small number of studies that consider the effect of hidden terminals on IEEE 802.11 throughput, and many are not accurate for a wide range of conditions. In this paper, we present an accurate new analytical saturation throughput model for the infrastructure case of IEEE 802.11 in the presence of hidden terminals. Simulation results show that our model is accurate in a wide variety of cases.