Modelling Capture Effect for 802.11 DCF under Rayleigh Fading

The capture effect can occur in IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) wireless systems when packets arrive with different powers. Packets with high power can effectively swamp low power packets, such that they are received successfully, when otherwise a collision would have occurred. We present a network performance prediction model that accurately incorporates the capture effect into a 3-D Markov Chain. The model is solved efficiently with the Collapsed Transition onto Basis (CTB) approach. The performance of the model is significantly better than existing models in terms of estimating important QoS measures, including packet delay and loss, as well as collision probability and throughput.