Received November 14, 2019, accepted November 29, 2019, date of publication December 6, 2019, date of current version December 23, 2019. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2958260 MAC-Layer Packet Loss Models for Wi-Fi Networks: A Survey CARLOS ALEXANDRE GOUVEA DA SILVA , (Student Member, IEEE), AND CARLOS MARCELO PEDROSO Electrical Engineering Department, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba 81531-980, Brazil Corresponding author: Carlos Alexandre Gouvea da Silva (carlos.gouvea@ieee.org) This work was supported in part by the Araucária Foundation for the Support of Scientific and Technological Development in the State of Paraná (FA) in partnership with the Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) under Grant 1633736 and Grant 88887.368940/2019-00. ABSTRACT Technical reports indicate that wireless and mobile devices will account for 71% of all IP traffic by 2022, an increase of 19% over four years. This increase is related to advances in wireless data communication technologies. Wireless networks have become one of the most important ways to connect devices to the Internet, therein improving productivity and encouraging information sharing. IEEE 802.11, known as Wi-Fi, has become the main standard for wireless local area networks. The most important metrics for measuring the quality of Wi-Fi are delay, jitter, and packet loss. Packet loss occurs when one or more packets fail to reach their destination and can occur for a variety of reasons. Packet loss influences the user’s perceived quality of applications over Wi-Fi networks, mainly multimedia and real-time applications. The availability of accurate models for packet loss in Wi-Fi networks enables the development of more efficient methods for performance analysis and network design, as well as better computational simulations. Modeling packet loss in such networks presents a major challenge because packets may be lost for many different reasons, including signal attenuation, noise, multipathing, signal refraction, thermal noise, competition for media access and buffer issues. In this paper, we provide an overview of the causes of packet loss and a comprehensive survey of the available models for packet loss in Wi-Fi networks. The potential benefits of the survey are: (i) the systematic presentation of available packet loss models for Wi-Fi networks, their parameters, and respective packet loss rate evaluation, (ii) comparison of models considering validation scenarios and input parameters, and (iii) description of open issues and future research directions. We hope that our analysis will help researchers understand the most important characteristics of the packet loss process in Wi-Fi networks and the strengths and weaknesses of the main packet loss models. INDEX TERMS Gilbert-Elliot model, packet loss model, packet loss rate, Wi-Fi communication. I. INTRODUCTION IEEE 802.11 is a set of specifications for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Since 1997, when the IEEE 802.11 standard was released, it has been continuously upgraded to improve throughput, security, reliability and quality of service, among other functionalities [1]. Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) includes IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n standards for WLAN that allow users to surf the Internet at broadband speeds [2] but also includes newest versions such as IEEE 802.11af/ac (2013) and IEEE 802.11ax (2019) [3]. Advances The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Yuan Gao . in wireless communication systems have resulted in substan- tial growth in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, which in turn has facilitated the development of new, cheaper devices and applications with reduced power consumption [4]. The rapid innovations in the wireless data communication area have increased services and application available to mobile device users worldwide. Wi-Fi networks have become very popular and are common in homes, offices, public parks, shops, airports, and hotels. The main applications supported by Wi-Fi are audio/video streaming, web browsing, file shar- ing, chatting and e-mail [1]. For video streaming, a consid- erable increase in data traffic is expected due to emergent video coding technologies, e.g., 8K resolution and scalable 180512 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VOLUME 7, 2019