Characterising the Behaviour of IEEE 802.11 Broadcast Transmissions in Ad Hoc Wireless LANs

This paper evaluates the performance of the IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic under both saturation and non- saturation conditions. The evaluation highlights some important characteristics of IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic as compared to corresponding unicast traffic. Moreover, it underlines the inaccuracy of the broadcast saturation model proposed by Ma and Chen due to the absence of backoff counter freeze process when channel is busy. Computer simulations are used to validate the accuracy of the new model and demonstrate the importance of capturing the freezing of backoff counter in the analytical study of IEEE 802.11 broadcast.