Analyzing the cumulative interfering noise in multi-hop IEEE 802.11 networks

Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11 multi-hop wireless networks has been drawing significant attention in recent years whereas most studies ignore the interfering noise far away. However, since the packets may overlap in time in multi-hop wireless networks, the cumulative energy of the noise coming from far away can be high enough to affect the performance of the network. In this paper, we investigate the interfering noise in the IEEE 802.11 wireless multi-hop networks. Then, we perform simulations to evaluate the effect of cumulative interfering noise on the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol. The results show that the transmission probability, collision probability and the saturation throughput of each flow in IEEE 802.11 multi-hop wireless networks have been greatly affected by the cumulative interfering noise.