Throughput Analysis In IEEE 802.11 Based Multi-hop Wireless Network

Nodes with IEEE 802.11 protocol competitively access the wireless channel based on the detection result of "busy" or "idle" state of wireless channel. In multi-hop wireless networks, the state transitions of wireless channel are more complex, so the analysis of network's throughput is difficult. More and more researchers began to focus on the throughput analysis in multi-hop wireless network.In this paper, we propose a novel throughput analysis method for IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop wireless networks. We also verify the method through a simulation, which shows our method can accurately describe the actual throughput performance of multi-hop wireless networks.This paper is organized as follows:at first we show IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function in detail and define four different channel states based on the node sensing the wireless channel. According to four different channel states, we define the throughput calculation method for the node in multi-hop wireless network. According to nodes which can successfully transmitting in the same time we define different network states in a multi-hop wireless network, and analyze the network states with a Markov process. Through the analysis of network states we get important parameters which required by the related channel states, and finish calculating the throughput of nodes in multi-hop network. Finally, by comparing the simulation results, our method can match the actual throughput situation in multi-hop wireless networks when the packet arrival rate is no less than 50%of the maximum packet processing rate.