Performance Analysis of 802.11e Transmission Bursting in Fiber-Fed Networks

A burst transmission mechanism has been defined in the IEEE 802.11e medium access control extension in order to reduce the overheads in protocol operation and improve efficiency. In this paper, we analyze the throughput and delay performance when this mechanism is used with the immediate acknowledgment policy in a fiber-fed wireless LAN (WLAN). It is shown that the extra propagation delay caused by the optical distribution network in the system affects the burst transmission operation in the presence or otherwise of channel errors and affects the optimum thresholds for switching between the basic access and the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) modes. It is also shown that significant throughput and media access delay improvements can be gained by the use of burst transmission in contention based 802.11e fiber-fed WLANs, regardless of the load in the network.