This paper is organized as follows. In section 2 the throughput is defined by analyzing the channel state as seen by a single node due to the distributed coordination function.
Section 3 introduces the concept of air-time of a link that models the impact of the network topology and the load of the links of all other nodes on a single node whereas in
section 4 the probability that a transmission is not successful is evaluated.
Section 5 illustrates the method with an elaborated example of the throughput evaluation in a chain topology using IEEE802.11b [2] with RTS/CTS enabled access and compares the results with event-driven simulations having the same settings.
An example showing the results for an arbitrary topology of 25 nodes concludes this paper.