Performance Anomaly of the IEEE 802.11 DCF in Different Frame Error Rate Conditions

We propose an analytic model to compute the station's saturated throughput and packet delay performance of the IEEE 802.11 DCF (Distributed Coordination Function) in which frame transmission error rates in the channel are different from each other. Our analytic model shows that a station experiencing worse frame error rates than the others suffers severe performance degradation below its deserved throughput and delay performance. 802.11 DCF adopts an exponential back-off scheme. When some stations suffer from high frame error rates, their back-off stages should be increased so that others get the benefit from the smaller collision probabilities. This impact is then recursively applied to degrade the performance of the victim stations. In particular, we show that the performance is considerably degraded even if the frame error rate of the victim station satisfies the receiver input level sensitivity that has been specified in the IEEE 802.11 standard. We also verify the analytic results by the OPNET simulations.