Performance Analysis of Multi-hop IEEE 802.11 DCF Backhaul Networks

Because of the wide deployment of 802.11 equipments in the past decade, current applications are not limited anymore to only single Access Points (AP) deployments for indoor usage, but have been extended to multi-hop networks to fulfill the need of high speed connectivity in mobile environments, where the analysis of multi-hop networks is extremely complicated. The behavior of an AP is dependent not only on its neighbors’ behavior, but also on the behavior of other hidden nodes. In this paper, we provide an accurate and verified multi-hop wireless backhaul analysis for performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF in terms of the channel throughput using a static channel error rate. The model is based on analysis of a single hop communications for evaluating the multi-hop wireless backhaul networks. We utilized our existing 3.5-mile Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) test bed on the BNSF railroad track in Nebraska to validate the model. Our field measurements and simulation results show that our proposed model is accurate.