Statistical analysis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC service time
Héctor Velayos, Gunnar Karlsson · 2005
Abstract: We present a statistical analysis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC service time. Our analysis complements the results from mathematical models, which focus on the mean delay. The location analysis shows that the service time’s distribution is skewed: the mean is always larger than the median, and the mode is always the smallest. A deeper analysis of the mean illustrates its dependence on the number of stations in the cell, the offered load, the packet size and the bit rate. The analysis of variability includes the coefficient of variation of the service time and its cumulative distribution function. The high variability found indicates that the 95-percentile of the service time may be a more meaningful measure than the mean. Finally, the analysis of correlation demonstrates that the service time of a packet is not predictable from the service time of previous packets.