Packet Size Variability Affects Collisions and Energy Efficiency in WLANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) support a wide range of applications, with various packet sizes. This diversity is set to increase in 802.11e WLANs which effectively allow very large packets controlled by a transmission opportunity (TxOP) parameter. This paper demonstrates a new phenomenon which occurs as a result of this diversity: When a network carries some large packets and many small packets, the collision probability after a large packet is much larger than predicted by previous models. This can be important because collision probability determines the number of packet transmissions, and hence the energy consumption. We propose a candidate model which captures this effect.