Effects ofTransmission Error Rates on Saturation Performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC

Analyzing the effect of transmission errors on the performance of IEEE 802.11 is important since the wireless channels are error-prone. Most of the existing work on the performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) assumes ideal channel conditions. Although a few recent papers consider the impact of packet error rate, they assume the same packet error rate for all the nodes in the system. Obviously, this is an unreasonable assumption for practical environments. In this paper, a new analytical model is developed to evaluate the performance of DCF, in which nodes incur different transmission error rates. An improved Markov chain model is presented to analyze the impact of packet error rates on the transmission probability. A state transition matrix is set up to derive the stationary performance. Our analytical model is validated via simulations using ns-2.