Service Modeling and Delay Analysis of Packet Delivery over a Wireless Link

For delay analysis of packet delivery over a wireless link, several novel ideas are introduced. One is to construct an equivalent $G/G/1$ non-lossy queueing model to ease the analysis, enabled by exploiting empirical models of packet error rate, packet service time and packet loss rate obtained from measurement. The second is to exploit a classical queueing theory result to approximate the mean delay. For estimating the delay distribution, the newly developed stochastic network calculus (SNC) theory is made use of, forming the third idea. To enable this SNC based analysis, a stochastic service curve characterization of the link is introduced, relying on a packet service time model obtained from the empirical models. The focused link is a 802.15.4 wireless link. Extensive experimental investigation under a wide range of settings was conducted. The proposed ideas are validated with the experiment results. The validation confirms that the proposed approaches, integrating both empirical and analytical modes, are effective for service modeling and delay analysis. This suggests an integrated approach, now found previously, for quantitative understanding of the delay performance of packet delivery over a wireless link.