Performance Evaluation of the IEEE 802.11 based wireless multihop networks

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 protocol is the most popular standard for local area network. It is widely assumed to be the lower layer protocol in testbeds and simulations for wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks, although, it is not designed for multi-hop networks. While it is used to support the wireless multi-hop ad-hoc network, some serious interference problems happen, all which are derived from the MAC layer. In this paper, we analyze the influence of RTS/CTS transaction and the binary exponential backoff scheme in the wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks. Through the simulation results, by turning RTS/CTS transaction on or off and by using the backoff scheme with the same contention window, we find that the performance of the multi-hop networks would improve.