Impact of channel conditions on the throughput optimization in 802.11 DCF

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of transmission error rate on the contention and the system throughput in IEEE 802.11 DCF. We identify the trade‐off between the desire to reduce the ratio of overhead in the data packet by adopting larger packet size and the need to reduce the packet error rate by using smaller packet length. Meanwhile, we provide a novel approach to model the different channel conditions incurred by different nodes. This work has applications in performance optimization by establishing trade‐offs between transmission error rate and transmission power, modulation, coding scheme, packet size. Our results substantiate the intuition that in a contention‐based system like 802.11 DCF, the channel variation of any single node in the system not only impacts the throughput of itself, but also affects the throughput of other nodes and the system throughput. Our work shows that to achieve maximum optimization of the throughput, the channel conditions of all the nodes in the system have to be taken into account. Otherwise the optimization is suboptimal.