In September 2020, the Broadband Forum published a new industry standard for measuring network quality. The standard centers on the notion of quality attenuation. Quality attenuation is a measure of the distribution of latency and packet loss between two points connected by a network path. A vital feature of the quality attenuation idea is that we can express detailed application requirements and network performance measurements in the same mathematical framework. Performance requirements and measurements are both modeled as latency distributions. To the best of our knowledge, existing models of the 802.11 WiFi protocol do not permit the calculation of complete latency distributions without assuming steady-state operation. We present a novel model of the WiFi protocol. Instead of computing throughput numbers from a steady-state analysis of a Markov chain, we explicitly model latency and packet loss. Explicitly modeling latency and loss allows for both transient and steady-state analysis of latency distributions, and we can derive throughput numbers from the latency results. Our model is, therefore, more general than the standard Markov chain methods. We reproduce several known results with this method. Using transient analysis, we derive bounds on WiFi throughput under the requirement that latency and packet loss must be bounded.

中文翻译：

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具有无限延迟的WiFi性能模型

2020年9月，宽带论坛发布了衡量网络质量的新行业标准。该标准以质量衰减的概念为中心。质量衰减是对通过网络路径连接的两个点之间延迟和数据包丢失分布的一种度量。质量衰减思想的一个重要特征是，我们可以在同一数学框架中表达详细的应用程序要求和网络性能度量。性能需求和度量都被建模为延迟分布。据我们所知，现有的802.11 WiFi协议模型不允许在不假设稳态操作的情况下计算完整的等待时间分布。我们提出了一种新型的WiFi协议模型。我们没有通过对马尔可夫链的稳态分析来计算吞吐量数字，而是显式地对延迟和数据包丢失进行建模。显式地对延迟和丢失进行建模可以对延迟分布进行瞬态和稳态分析，并且我们可以从延迟结果中得出吞吐量数字。因此，我们的模型比标准的马尔可夫链方法更通用。我们用这种方法重现了几个已知的结果。使用瞬态分析，我们得出了必须限制等待时间和数据包丢失的要求下WiFi吞吐量的界限。比标准马尔可夫链方法更通用。我们用这种方法重现了几个已知的结果。使用瞬态分析，我们得出了必须限制等待时间和数据包丢失的要求下WiFi吞吐量的界限。比标准马尔可夫链方法更通用。我们用这种方法重现了几个已知的结果。使用瞬态分析，我们得出了必须限制等待时间和数据包丢失的要求下WiFi吞吐量的界限。