Theoretical Analysis of Saturation Throughput in MU-DCF

In this paper, the calculation of saturation throughput for previously proposed multi-user - distributed coordination function (MU-DCF) is presented. MU-DCF is an IEEE 802.11 based protocol that supports multi-user (MU)-multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) transmissions. The analysis is for two extreme case scenarios: access point (AP) downlink in a hotspot scenario, and fully interconnected network. Special attention is payed on the statistical properties of traffic sources, since in MU-DCF networks they have strong impact on performance. In addition, the difference in performance between MU and single-user (SU) transmission strategies is evaluated, pointing out to the tradeoff between delay and throughput.