Performance comparison of medium access control schemes for IEEE 802.11

Abstract

The distributed coordination function (DCF) of the IEEE 802.11 standard based medium access control has drawn significant interest from the researchers in the past decade. Many proposals of its performance analysis and modifications to remove its limitations are proposed. In this paper we are considering some recent proposals to make a detailed study of the performance comparison between DCF, CONTI, k-EC, and PREMA, which are various contention resolution schemes proposed in various independent researches. The criteria for performance comparison that we use are collision rate, throughput, and average delay between successful transmissions. Also, we consider queuing delay using an exponential on-off based unsaturated model for these protocols whose implementation and performance is consistent with the saturated mode used in the above contention schemes.