Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DCF with imperfect radio conditions

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) are widely used in recent years. The basic 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) method for controlling the medium access is the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) which is an access scheme based on the contention principle using Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). Most of the analytical studies investigating the performance of DCF and the saturation throughput at MAC layer assume ideal channel conditions where the retransmission of a packet only results from a collision. In this paper, we present an analytical model to estimate the saturation throughput at the MAC layer for a fixed number of stations taking into account the imperfections of the radio channels. The latter is investigated for different modulation techniques.