  In this paper, we provide a saturation throughput analysis of the IEEE 802.11
protocol at the data link layer by including the impact of both transmission
channel and capture effects in Rayleigh fading environment. Impacts of both
non-ideal channel and capture effects, specially in an environment of high
interference, become important in terms of the actual observed throughput. As
far as the 4-way handshaking mechanism is concerned, we extend the
multi-dimensional Markovian state transition model characterizing the behavior
at the MAC layer by including transmission states that account for packet
transmission failures due to errors caused by propagation through the channel.
This way, any channel model characterizing the physical transmission medium can
be accommodated, including AWGN and fading channels. We also extend the Markov
model in order to consider the behavior of the contention window when employing
the basic 2-way handshaking mechanism.
  Under the usual assumptions regarding the traffic generated per node and
independence of packet collisions, we solve for the stationary probabilities of
the Markov chain and develop expressions for the saturation throughput as a
function of the number of terminals, packet sizes, raw channel error rates,
capture probability, and other key system parameters. The theoretical
derivations are then compared to simulation results confirming the
effectiveness of the proposed models.
