Throughput and delay analysis of 802.11 networks

Abstract

WiFi (IEEE 802.11) has become the most popular and important wireless access medium nowadays, a lot of public areas are covered with WiFi connection. However, its theoretical performance is still not yet well understood which is mainly because of the lack of appropriate modelling on the contention process in a random access networks. In this project, we will applied the proposed theoretical framework of the 802.11 networks to do a comprehensive simulation to verify the theoretical results, particularly, the contention window size and maximum back off stage will be investigated to see how they are affecting the network throughput and delay under both saturated and unsaturated condition. Then by collecting these results, a trade-off between throughput and delay can be figure out to achieve the best performance.