Performance modeling and analysis of IEEE 802.11 protocol using POOSL

In wireless LANs (WLANs), the medium access control (MAC) protocol is the main element that determines the efficiency of the wireless channel. In this paper, we focus on analyzing IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in different network scenarios systematically. In order to analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, a performance model of IEEE 802.11 protocol was built using parallel object-oriented specification language (POOSL). The model is validated from two aspects of function behavior and theoretical analysis. The performance metrics such as valid throughput, average delay and probability of collision were analyzed in ad hoc network and infrastructure network with access point (AP). Through simulation of the model, the influence of the parameters such as minimum contention window (CW_min) and number of active stations on the performance metrics was given. The low-cost CPU execution speed of AP is also confirmed by analyzing the utilization of CPU. The methods of performance modeling and analysis in this paper can be applied to study the performance of other wireless communication protocols such as 802.15, 802.16, 802.20, and beyond.