Analyzing the Impact of Various Modulation and Coding Schemes on the MAC Layer of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

The throughput of the medium access control sub-layer in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network depends on the performance of the network at the physical layer level. In this paper, we perform cross layer analysis between the medium access control and the physical layers in order to study the behavior of the network including the achieved throughput for various types of modulation and coding schemes. In our analysis, we take into account the packet error rate of the schemes as a loss factor in an improved Markov Chain model. The model is in consistent with the DCF access mechanism of IEEE 802.11 standard and it includes all of its parameters in different operating conditions. Expressions for throughput and average service time of packets are provided. The analytical expressions are solved using MATLAB and the model is validated by experiments.