Measured performance of point-to-point 802.11a

This paper studies the measured behavior of point-to-point 802.11a links at low and high antenna elevations. The purpose of the project is to investigate the possibility of using 802.11a links to interconnect houses and community centers in rural areas with minimum cost. We built an experimental setup using commercial WLAN cards and high gain antennas. We used typical FTP protocol software to transfer large files which allowed us to estimate the transmission data rate. As expected, we found that the data rate is very sensitive to the antenna height, but we could still transmit data at fairly high data rates even when the antenna height was less than 3 meters.