Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ad MAC Protocol

IEEE 802.11ad specifies a hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol consisting of contention as well as non-contention-based channel access mechanisms. It also employs directional antennas to compensate for the high free-space path loss observed in 60 GHz frequency band. Therefore, it significantly differs from other IEEE 802.11(b/g/n/ac) MAC protocols and thus requires new methods to analyze its performance. We propose a new analytical model for performance analysis of IEEE 802.11ad employing a 3-D Markov chain considering all the features of IEEE 802.11ad medium access mechanisms including the presence of non-contention access and the different number of sectors due to the use of directional antennas. We show that the number of sectors has a high impact on the network throughput. We show that the MAC packet delay is significantly affected by the duration of the contention period. Our results indicate that a suitable choice of the number of sectors and contention period can improve the channel utilization and MAC delay performance.