Performance Analysis Of Frame-Burst-based Medium Access Control Protocols Under Imperfect Wireless Channels

How to provide high throughput performance is a major challenge in the design of MAC protocol for next generation wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless personal area networks (WPANs). To achieve this goal, frame-burst-based CSMA/CA protocols have been proposed recently in both academia and industry. The main idea of the frame-burst-based protocol is to aggregate multiple upperlayer packets into a larger burst frame at the MAC layer; thus the MAC layer overhead can be substantially reduced. In our previous studies, we have demonstrated analytically that the frame-burst-based protocol can significantly improve the throughput performance of CSMA/CA protocol in the error-free channel condition. Since wireless channels are generally error-prone in practice, it is very important to study the performance of MAC protocols under such condition. In this paper, we address this issue and develop an analytical model to evaluate the unsaturated throughput performance of the frame-burst-based CSMA/CA protocol in imperfect wireless channel. Numerical results show that, our analytical model is highly accurate. More importantly, our results reveal that, given the traffic load and the bit error rate (BER) of channel, the best throughput performance can be achieved through appropriate setting of burst aggregation policy. Index Term— WLAN, high data rate, MAC, CSMA/CA, analytical model, throughput.