Analyzing impacts of physical interference on a transmission in IEEE 802.11 mesh networks

Abstract

Interference is an inherent property of wireless multi-hop networks. In 802.11 wireless multi-hop networks, the impacting of physical interference on a transmission is complexity phenomenon that is the cause of degraded network performance. Several previous studies use analytical model to clarify the issue as a common approach. However, the models did not take fully considerations of physical interference on a transmission such as back-off freezing phenomenon and inter-flow interference. Hence, this paper proposes a novel analytical model based on Markov chain to model the 802.11 MAC based multi-hop mesh networks under fully physical interference. The model is developed to overcome these existed challenges of previous studies and validated by numerical results.