Performance Analysis of Burst Transmission Mechanism for IEEE 802.11-Based Multi-Hop Wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11-based multihop wireless networks have attracted considerable attention for next-generation networks since it can extend the service coverage area without difficulty. However, it is well known that the effective end-to-end throughput (E2ET) degrades due to the overhead caused by the distributed coordination function (DCF) scheme of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. To improve this issue, the transmission opportunity (TXOP) mechanism is defined in the IEEE 802.11e standard, with which a wireless node can transmit multiple frames consecutively for a maximum channel occupancy time, called TXOPlimit. This paper considers the performance of the TXOP mechanism for multihop wireless networks. Focusing on a three-node chain topology, we model it as a tandem queueing network with two nodes. The E2ET is derived and the analysis is validated by simulation. Numerical results show that the TXOP mechanism works well for multihop wireless networks. It is also shown that adjusting TXOPlimit is significantly important in order to increase the overall throughput.