Modeling the Impact of Buffering on 802.11

A finite load, large buffer model for the WLAN medium access protocol IEEE 802.11 is developed that gives throughput and delay predictions. This enables us to investigate the impact of buffering on resource allocation. In the presence of heterogeneous loads, 802.11 do not allocate transmission opportunities equally. It is shown that increased buffering can help this inequity, but only at the expense of possibly significantly increased delays