802.11b/g link level measurements for an outdoor wireless campus network

Outdoor WLAN communication is envisioning an increasing interest, due to the massive emergence and deployment of outdoor wireless mesh networks. This paper provides a report on an extensive measurement campaign carried out in an outdoor wireless LAN campus scenario. A public domain driver, namely MADWiFi, has been modified in order to achieve a high (per-node and per-frame) measurement granularity, and in order to distinguish the different causes that contribute to link-layer errors. The main result of our experimental investigation is that, unlike 802.11b, which appears a robust technology in most of the operational conditions, 802.11g may lead to severe inefficiencies when employed in an outdoor scenario