A Protocol-Independent Approach for Analyzing the Optimal Operation Point of CSMA/CA Protocols

This paper presents a protocol-independent approach to reveal a new insight into the performance of carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocols: the family of CSMA/CA protocols, independent of implementation details, share the same optimal operation point where the maximum protocol capacity is achieved. The protocol- independent analysis is inspired by the concept of virtual time slot. At the timescale of virtual-slot, all the CSMA/CA protocols show the same behavior pattern and, therefore, a generic virtual- slot based S-G (VS S-G) analysis is developed to compute the optimal operation point. The accuracy of the VS S-G analysis is benchmarked against the precise protocol-specific analysis, in particular, for the 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) and the 802.15.4 contention access period (CAP). Furthermore, this paper discusses how to integrate the network-layer queueing analysis with the VS S-G analysis at the medium access control (MAC) layer to form a generic cross-layer framework for call- level network capacity analysis.