Analysis of Mobility in Adaptive Data Rate Wireless Networks

Analysis of mobility relies on the analysis of the throughput of a mobile terminal in a constantly changing environment. Such throughput analysis of the modern multi-rate wireless mobile data systems such as WLAN, WiMAX and WPAN is a challenging problem, which has not been treated thoroughly in the current literature. The complexity increases when the effect of roaming is considered. The average throughput of a terminal is a function of the distance between the connecting access point and the mobile terminal. For a given distance, because of the shadow fading, the terminal may have several different data rates and its effective data rate is an average of all the experienced data rates. In addition, when the terminal roams from the near vicinity of one access point to another, it has certain penalty of loosing connection time due to the handoff process that needs to be accounted for. In this paper we provide analytical tools to evaluate a performance of mobile terminals in a multi-rate wireless networks. The throughput-distance relationship in shadow fading is presented after which this relationship is applied to performance analysis of a moving station