Performance Measurements and Analysis of the Interference of Things on 802.11 Networks

In ubiquitous environments, the mobility of mobile nodes has been increasing. Due to the increased mobility for mobile nodes, we experience co-channel or adjacent interference very frequently. These interference phenomena are becoming a big issue because they represent significant performance degradation of the wireless network. In this paper, we conducted several experiments outside in order to validate the co-channel interference phenomenon. As we measured network performance in an outdoor environment without existing Wi-Fi signal, we did analysis about the performance impact to the TCP layer in a wireless ad-hoc network. Our work contributes to a more clear understanding for error propagation to the upper layer of the network stack when co-channel interference occurs in an ad-hoc network and propose a theoretical maximum throughput considering error rate in the data link layer and TCP layer.