Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11 WLANs with frame aggregation and unsaturated traffic load

Existing performance models of modern IEEE 802.11 networks with frame aggregation do not correctly reflect the operations for usual/unsaturated traffic conditions. Some of them assume a predefined service-time distribution. Others model very specific cases of unsaturated traffic load, such as stations defering transmission until $K$ packets are gathered or stations always having at least one packet in their buffers. We propose a new performance model for 802.11 networks with frame aggregation and unsaturated traffic load, where the aggregation size, and the service times are dynamically determined by a number of factors such as the offered traffic load, the random backoff process, the number of stations, etc. Performance evaluations show that the proposed model produces a more accurate throughput for different numbers of nodes and various traffic loads.