QUEUING ANALYSIS OF IEEE 802.11 WLAN

IEEE 802.11 WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) have become synonymous as one of the main access technologies to the internet almost everywhere including business, office and home. This paper develops a simple queuing model to analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11 WLANs. We model a single IEEE 802.11 Wireless Station (WSTA) by means of a single server queue with infinite buffer wherein the service time is a function of backoff process which is function of number of stations trying to compete in the medium along with retry limit. We first derive the mean and second moment of backoff time of a WSTA using the Markov Chain Model outlined in [2]. Then the service time distribution is obtained. Then different distributions for the arrival process - Poisson, deterministic, normal and Pareto, are considered to model traffic realistically and analyze the waiting time and the queue length in the GI/G/1 queues for different network sizes.