Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ad MAC Protocol

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 also employs directional antennas to compensate for the high freespace path loss observed in 60GHz frequency band. Therefore, it significantly differs from other IEEE 802.11(b/g/n/ac) MAC protocols and thus requires new methods to analyze its performance. In this paper, we propose a new analytical model for performance analysis of IEEE 802.11ad employing a threedimensional Markov chain considering all the features of IEEE 802.11ad medium access mechanisms including the presence of non-contention access and the different number of sectors due to the use of directional antennas. 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 contention period can illustriously improve the channel utilization and MAC delay performance.