Measured performance of the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

The practical network performances of two commercial IEEE 802.11 compliant wireless local area networks (WLANs) are measured at the medium access control sublayer. A number of tests conducted on the WLANs yielded important characteristics such as throughput and response time under various network loads. The results reveal that the buffering and fragmentation of data frames can seriously influence the performance of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN. Although the length of a data frame and the bit rate of the wireless transceiver also affect the WLANs transmission capabilities, its performance is generally unaffected by the type of frame addressing and the use of reservation frames such as request-to-send (RTS) and clear-to-send (CTS). These observations have not been reported in the analytical, simulation or measurement studies carried out so far. Thus, the detailed empirical results presented in this paper will be useful for administrators of IEEE 802.11 WLAN systems.