Wi-Fi was originally designed to provide broadband wireless Internet access for devices which generate rather heavy streams. And Wi-Fi succeeded. The coming revolution of the Internet of Things with myriads of autonomous devices and machine type communications (MTC) traffic raises a question: can the Wi-Fi success story be repeated in the area of MTC? Started in 2010, IEEE 802.11 Task Group ah (TGah) has developed a draft amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard, adapting Wi-Fi for MTC requirements. The performance of novel channel access enhancements in MTC scenarios can hardly be studied with models from Bianchi's clan, which typically assume that traffic load does not change with time. This paper contributes with a pioneer analytical approach to study Wi-Fi-based MTC, which can be used to investigate and customize many mechanisms developed by TGah.
The IEEE has standardized the 802.11 protocol for wireless local area networks. The primary medium access control (MAC) technique of 802.11 is called the distributed coordination function (DCF). The DCF is a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA CA) scheme with binary slotted exponential backoff. This paper provides a simple, but nevertheless extremely accurate, analytical model to compute the 802.11 DCF throughput, in the assumption of finite number of terminals and ideal channel conditions. The proposed analysis applies to both the packet transmission schemes employed by DCF, namely, the basic access and the RTS CTS access mechanisms. In addition, it also applies to a combination of the two schemes, in which packets longer than a given threshold are transmitted according to the RTS CTS mechanism. By means of the proposed model, we provide an extensive throughput performance evaluation of both access mechanisms of the 802.11 protocol.