Performance comparison of the radio link protocols of IEEE802.11a and HIPERLAN/2

Two wireless LAN standards are being developed in the 5 GHz band, namely IEEE802.11a and HIPERLAN/2. The physical layers of both standards use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme as the modulation and can provide several transmission modes with different data rates. The basic medium access mechanism in IEEE802.11a is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), while HIPERLAN/2 rises centralised controlled multiple access. To support reliable transmission Stop and Wait ARQ and Selective Repeat ARQ schemes are adopted in IEEE802.11a and HIPERLAN/2, respectively. This paper compares the data throughput provided by both standards in a radio cell with one access point and one mobile terminal. The simulation results show that HIPERLAN/2 provide higher data throughput than IEEE802.11a.