Unsaturated Throughput Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF under Imperfect Channel Sensing

Abstract

In this paper, throughput of IEEE 802.11 carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision-avoidance (CA) protocols in non-saturated traffic conditions is presented taking into account the impact of imperfect channel sensing. The imperfect channel sensing includes both missed-detection and false alarm and their impact on the utilization of IEEE 802.11 analyzed and expressed as a closed form. To include the imperfect channel sensing at the physical layer, we modified the state transition probabilities of well-known two state Markov process model. Simulation results closely match the theoretical expressions confirming the effectiveness of the proposed model. Based on both theoretical and simulated results, the choice of the best probability detection while maintaining probability of false alarm is less than 0.5 is a key factor for maximizing utilization of IEEE 802.11.