Performance of the IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs under influence of hidden terminals and Pareto distributed packet traffic

The performance of the MAC protocol for the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN is examined with respect to the hidden terminal problem. The system is exposed to bursty traffic from multiple sources with Pareto-distributed packet interarrival times. The simulation results clearly show that hidden terminals introduce a significant impact on network performance, especially on maximum achievable throughput and delay at moderate loads. However different level of source burstiness seem to have no considerable influence over the throughput and delay because of the MAC sublayer transmit queue acting as a traffic equalizer.