01701nas a2200181   4500000000100000000000100001000000100002008004100003100002400044700002200068700001200090700002000102245012000122300001400242490000700256520124200263022001401505       2010                            d1 aTadeusz Czachórski1 aKrzysztof Grochla1 aT. Nycz1 aFerhan Pekergin00aA diffusion approximation model for wireless networks based on IEEE 802.11 standard, Computer Communication Journal  aS86–S920 v333 aThe article presents an analytical model of wireless networks using the IEEE 802.11 protocol to access the transport medium. The model allows to determine such key factors of the quality of service as transmission delays and losses. The model is based on diffusion approximation approach which was proposed three decades ago to model wired networks. We show that it can be adapted to take into consideration the input streams with general interarrival time distributions and servers with general service time distributions. The diffusion approximation has been chosen because of fairly general assumptions of models based on it, hard to be represented in Markov models. A queueing network model can have an arbitrary topology, the intensity of transmitted flows can be represented by non-Poisson (even self-similar) streams, the service times at nodes can be defined by general distributions. These assumptions are important: because of the CSMA/CA algorithm, the overall times needed to sent a packet are far from being exponentially distributed and therefore the flows between nodes are non-Poisson. Diffusion approximation allows us also to analyse the of transient behaviour of a network when traffic intensity is changing with time.  a0140-3664