A measurement based method for estimating the number of contending stations in IEEE 802.11 WLAN under erroneous channel condition

Abstract

Performance on throughput of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) is severely affected by the number of contending stations. Thus, many methods for estimating the number of contending stations have been proposed in order to improve the performance of IEEE 802.11 by adjusting the medium access control (MAC) parameters according to the number of contending stations. However, since the methods estimate the number of contending stations only under the strict assumptions for specific conditions, they cannot correctly estimate the number of contending stations in the general environments. Therefore, in order to estimate the number of contending stations in the general environments, a new estimation algorithm is required. In this paper, we propose a measurement based method for estimating the number of contending stations. From simulation results, we confirm that the proposed method can more accurately estimate the number of contending stations than the existing methods under ideal and erroneous channel conditions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.