The Throughput Analysis of IEEE 802.11a WLAN with Low-Rate Access Nodes

The function of multi-rate support (14 rate ranks from 1Mbps to 54Mbps) in PHYs is prescribed in IEEE 802.11 protocol. To analyze the serious affects to the throughput of whole networks caused by the low- rate access nodes, a precise algorithm is proposed based on the improved Markov model in DCF protocol. The throughput of WLAN is conducted with low-rate access nodes, and the simulation results with NS2 prove the conclusion. After that the optimization methods are proposed for the low-rate access nodes, and all these are the effective references for network planning and optimization.