Packet error model for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

Packet error in the IEEE 802.11 network is one source of performance degradation and its variability. Most of the previous works study how collision avoidance and hidden terminals affect the IEEE 802.11 performance metrics, such as probability of a collision and saturation throughput. In this paper we focus on the effect of packet errors on capacity and variability of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. We develop a new analytical model, called p_e-model, by extending the existing model (Tay and Chun´s model) to incorporate packet error probability p_e. With p_e-model, we successfully analyze the capacity and variability of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The variability analysis shows that increasing packet error probability by Δp_e has more effect on saturation throughput than adding 0.5 W Δp_e stations, where W is the minimum contention window size. We also show the numerical validation of p_e-model with the IEEE 802.11 MAC-level simulator.