A finite queueing model for IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

The performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol has recently attracted attention from research mainly by means of simulation. Most proposed analytic models focus on the analysis of throughput and MAC transmission delay. However, so far there is no analytic model for the MAC queueing delay, which itself is a significant part of the end-to-end delay. Moreover, all the existing analytical and simulation models overlook an important phenomenon in any practical network - blocking due to finite buffering capacity. To eliminate the packet blocking simply by increasing the capacity of the station queue is not acceptable, because the additional queue delay introduced will cause the failure of multimedia application with strict time constraints. In this paper, for the first time we establish a finite queueing model for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol and evaluate the packet blocking probability and the MAC queueing delay.