Evaluating wireless architectures for GDS applications

While wireless data communication technology promises to be the next primary communication media in the 21st century, thus far, skepticism about their degree of reliability and performance has prevented wireless networks from replacing traditional networks in critical or demanding applications. In this paper, we explore the use of wireless environments in various applications related to group decision support (GDS) systems. In particular, we look into the impact of using various network architectures on the performance measures of GDS applications. Our experiments show that while the quality of service parameters of wireless networks still do not match those of wired networks, the performance of wireless environments is acceptable for several GDS applications. We show that selecting the proper wireless architecture has a significant impact on the performance of the applications. In particular, the peer-to-peer architecture provided far better performance than other wireless architectures.