Throughput analysis for IEEE 802.11 in multi-hop wireless networks

IEEE 802.11 network uses the physical carrier sensing and RTS/CTS handshake as the main two techniques to combat interference and hidden node problem. But both techniques do not function well if the interferer or hidden node is beyond the transmission range of receivers. In our model, we take this fact into consideration when analyzing the performance of IEEE 802.11 in multi-hop wireless network. Instead of analyzing the network based on the behavior of the transmitter node, we take the receiver node as the point of reference. Mainly, we divide the network around the multi-hop path into a congregation of interleaved single hop subnetworks, i.e., each subnetwork covers up to 2-hop neighbors of one of the reference nodes. We use a finite capacity M/G/1/K queue and independent samples from saturation analysis to analyze the nonsaturation performance of the single hop wireless network. Then, we present a general analytical model and an iterative method to analyze the performance of the multi-hop path. Simulation results show good agreement with the analytical results.