Jitter analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DCF access mode

Quality of service in WLANs has been a major concern of both academia and industry for many years. A number of methods have been published regarding delay analysis of 802.11 networks, but little research has been carried out for the jitter analysis, even though jitter can be more important than delay for real time applications, like voice over IP, multimedia streaming, etc. In this paper we introduce a new analytical method for estimating the jitter caused by the distributed coordination function of the 802.11 MAC protocol. This model is also evaluated by a series of simulations.