IEEE 802.11 and ETSI HIPERLAN type 1: performance comparison under influence of burst-noise channel

The performance measures of the two standardized WLANs, IEEE 802.11 and ETSI HIPERLAN type 1 have been evaluated and compared under the influence of burst-noise channel (i.e. BER) and "hidden terminal" effect (i.e. "hidden terminal" occurrence probability, P/sub h/). Those effects cause a throughput reduction and increase of delay and discard probability in both WLANs. However, the sophisticated but high overhead EY-NPMA protocol of HIPERLAN 1 suffers higher performance degradation under influence of the fading air medium. In addition, in order to explain the behavior of the WLANs more accurately, one must also consider the impact of the queue length and the number of stations in the ad-hoc network.