Theoretical Analysis of Saturation Throughput in MU-DCF

In this paper, the calculation of saturation throughput for previously proposed Multi-User - Distributed Coordination Function (MU-DCF) is presented. MU-DCF is an IEEE 802.11 based protocol that supports Multi-User (MU)-Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO) transmissions. The analysis is for two extreme case scenarios: Access Point (AP) downlink in a hotspot scenario, and fully interconnected network. Special attention is payed on the statistical properties of traffic sources, since in MU-DCF networks they have strong impact on performance. In addition, the difference in performance between MU and Single-User (SU) transmission strategies is evaluated, pointing out to the tradeoff between delay and throughput.