Effect of Application Types on the Performance of WiFi Networks

The explosive increase in the use of smartphones and digital devices lead to an increase in the deployment of WiFi access points (IEEE802.11 standard) in private and public environments. This increase poses great challenges for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) design and implementation. The major part of the traffic in these networks is generated by video streaming and audio applications. Dealing with heterogeneous traffic has become a major challenge for WiFi networks due to the emerging applications. Modeling the traffic generated by each device is essential for correctly evaluating the performance of WiFi networks. This paper presents an analytical performance model for WiFi networks that takes into account the effect of the different application types. We used the N-Burst/M/l queuing model to estimate the average packet delay and the buffer overflow probability for wireless networks. The ON/OFF traffic model is used to model the heterogeneous traffic of the network applications. We use the performance model presented in this paper to evaluate the effect of application type on the performance of WiFi networks.