Throughput analysis of IEEE 802.11 in multi-hop ad hoc networks

The paper presents an analytical model to compute the saturated throughput of IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in a multi-hop ad hoc network. Our work is based on the Bianchi's model where the performance of 802.11 DCF in the absence of hidden stations is analyzed using a discrete time Markov chain. In our model, the wireless stations are randomly located in an area according to a two-dimension Poisson distribution with density lambda, and every station always has a packet to transmit. We compute the saturated throughput with hidden terminal effect under ideal channel conditions. The influences of the packet size, average number of neighbors and initial contention window size on the throughput are presented.