Modeling and Analysis of Wireless LANs with a Backoff Freezing Mechanism

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a more accurate analytical model of IEEE 802.11 DCF WLAN which accounts for a backoff freezing mechanism. We model the backoff operation of a station with a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC). The proposed DTMC considers three types of the backoff counter operations: choosing a new backoff counter, decrementing the backoff counter, and freezing the backoff counter. The proposed model captures three types of previous channel status: idle, busy due to a successful transmission, and busy due to a collision. We analyze the throughput performance of the proposed model with a frame retry limit.