Throughput analysis of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs using an average cycle time approach

In this paper, we present a simple analytical framework for computing the throughput of IEEE 802.11 based wireless LANs. We show that a notion of average cycle time exists in DCF access where by all stations, on average, successfully transmit one packet in a cycle. We provide explicit expressions for the average cycle time and the system throughput. Our approach readily depicts that the average cycle time, and hence the throughput, is the same for different users regardless of the differences in their physical data rates. It thus serves as a simple and accurate re-derivation of the well known equal throughput property of DCF seen in multi-rate WLANs. Our analytical results are compared against extensive simulations and are shown to be in very good agreement