Saturation Throughput of IEEE 802.11 DCF in Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

IEEE 802.11 DCF has been widely used in wireless multi-hop ad hoc networks as the medium access control protocol. However, how well it can perform has not been well studied. In this paper, the authors first propose a new Markov chain model to analyze the per-node throughput by taking into consideration three important issues in multi-hop networks, i.e., physical carrier sensing threshold, signal-to-interference plus noise ratio threshold, and hidden terminal problems. Then, they validate their analytical model by simulations. They find the simulation results match their theoretical results well.