Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF under Nonsaturation Condition

Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) methods are considered to be attractive MAC protocols for wireless LANs. IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) is a random channel access scheme based on CSMA/CA method and the binary slotted exponential backoff procedure to reduce the packet collision. In this paper, we propose a new analytical model for a nonsaturated IEEE 802.11 DCF network and evaluate its performance. We verify our model using simulations and show that our results agree with the simulations.