Performance of Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance Protocols in Wireless LANs

Abstract

The performance of Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance(CSMA/CA) protocols, which is adopted as a draft standard in IEEE 802.11, is analyzed in the view of throughput and packet delay. We consider three kinds of CSMA/CA protocols, which include Basic, Stop-and-Wait and 4-Way Handshake CSMA/CA, and introduce a theoretical analysis for them. First, we consider that a network consists of a finite population and then expand to an infinite population model. We model the CSMA/CA protocol as a hybrid protocol of a 1-persistent CSMA and a p-persistent CSMA protocol. We calculate the throughput and packet delay for three kind of CSMA/CA protocols and verify analytical results by computer simulation. We have found that 4-Way Handshake CSMA/CA shows better performance than those of other two type CSMA/CA in high traffic load and analytical results are very close to simulation ones.