Scaling Properties of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol has gained widespread popularity and has been adopted as the de-facto layer 2 protocols for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Because of its popularity, there has been a large body of work focusing on its analytical modeling, simulation study, and measurement-based performance evaluation. The authors summarize the protocol's main functionality. Time is slotted with the duration of each slot equal to a constant value, which the authors will be calling SlotTime. A station that wants to transmit a frame first senses the medium.