Performance Analysis in Spatially Correlated IEEE 802.11 Networks

Wireless mesh networks are difficult to be characterized, especially under multi-hop traffic streams. The problem is that the local view of the channel and the correlation between the buffers of consecutive nodes in a stream path make complicated the identification of the contention level perceived by each station along the time. Such a figure is used in the models based on the so called decoupling assumption for evaluating the final scheduling of simultaneous channel access grants. In this paper we propose a simplified mesh network model focused on capturing the correlation due to the network topology and traffic routes rather than the access protocol state at each node. To this purpose, we consider the whole collection of node states (in terms of transreceiver activity and buffer length) as network model state. Despite of the large state dimension, the model complexity is very low thanks to the strong simplifications introduced in modeling the access protocol. Numerical results show that the approach is promising and suitable for those network scenarios (limited number of nodes, multi-hop traffic streams) in which previous models results not appropriate or too complex.