Characterizing the Exit Process of a Non-Saturated IEEE 802.11 Wireless Network

In this paper, we consider a non-saturated IEEE 802.11 based wireless network. We use a three-way fixed point to model the node behavior with Bernoulli packet arrivals and determine closed form expressions for the distribution of the time spent between two successful transmissions in an isolated network. The results of the analysis have been verified using extensive simulations in QualNet. The methodology presented in the paper is novel and we believe that the analysis like ours can be used as an approximation to model the behavior of sub-components of a larger mesh or hybrid network.