A Novel Analytical Model to Identify Link Quality in 802.11 Mesh Networks

The rapid growths of wireless mesh infrastructure based on IEEE 802.11 has gained more and more attention from researchers on both practical and theoretical studies. Markov chain models have been widely used in describing complex systems and can be seen as a common and effective tool to analyze behaviors of 802.11 MAC protocols in distributed multiple access environments. A novel analytical model is presented in this paper to predict quality of links in multi-hop wireless networks through the relationship between node state model and channel state model. This approach is fully investigated the CSMA/CA mechanism of 802.11 mesh network under unsaturated traffic and error-prone channel conditions. Our analysis reveals how the throughput of the 802.11-based wireless mesh networks is affected by the incoming traffic, network density, sensing range and bit error rate.