Abstract-IEEE 802.11ad specifies a hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol consisting of contention as well as noncontention based channel access mechanisms. Further, it has also provisioned the use of directional antennas to compensate for the high free-space path loss at 60 GHz. Therefore, it significantly differs from IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac MAC protocols and requires new methods to analyze its performance. In this paper, we propose a new analytical model for IEEE 802.11ad MAC protocol and derive important performance metrics. The proposed model employing a three dimensional Markov chain considers all the features of IEEE 802.11ad medium access mechanism including the non-contention mode of channel access and different number of sectors due to the use of directional antennas. Analyzing IEEE 802.11ad using our model, we show that the number of sectors has a high impact on the network throughput. We also show that the MAC packet delay is significantly affected by the duration of the contention period. Our results indicate that a suitable choice of the number of sectors and the contention period can illustriously improve the channel utilization and MAC delay performance.
Thus, the assumption made in REF strongly affects the analysis of the delay and the impact of the number of sectors used by the PCP/AP on the system performance, as the role of directional transmissions and deafness is neglected.
Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ad MAC Protocol
IEEE Communications Letters 2017
Computer Science