Reasoning about communication latencies in real WLANs

Large diffusion of wireless communications is a trend that will soon involve industrial environments, too, and in particular those applications where granting limited response times is of utmost importance. This paper analyzes the impact of a number of causes, besides the medium access technique, on the performance of real 802.11g networks. In particular, the extent to which beacon frames and traffic on nearby channels can decrease the communication performance is taken into account, as well as the effect of the adapter's and access point's overheads on frame transmission latencies.