A study of the performance of HIPERLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a physical layers

HIPERLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a are two wireless LAN (WLAN) standards which operate in the 5 GHz band. In order to support broadband multimedia communications, they can provide data rates up to 54 Mbps. An overview of the two standards is presented together with software simulated physical layer performance results. The differences between the two standards (PDU size, MAC layers etc.) and the effects on throughput and range are also discussed.