Sizing of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

Abstract

Sizing of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs), defined as the problem of finding the maximum number of users that can be supported, is essential for efficient application performance over WLANs. The usage of existing analytical models of 802.11 MAC in sizing requires a mapping from application load and performance to link-layer load and performance respectively, which we propose in this paper. We first evaluate analytical models of 802.11 MAC from the sizing perspective and then propose an approximate sizing method. We illustrate our method through an HTTP application and validate it through extensive ns-2 simulations which show that the number of users suggested by our tool are within 13% of those derived from simulations for a majority of the test cases.

Analysis of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA Under Statistical Traffic

“…Our model is useful to predict and analyze the performance of the WLANs that implement the IEEE 802.11 standards. Another application is for network sizing (a method is discussed in [8], which uses the Markovian Framework introduced by Foh and Zukerman).…”

“…Foh and Zukerman [7] proposed a Markovian Framework model to analyze the performance of DCF under statistical traffic. In [8], Patil and Apte uses this Markovian Framework model to find the maximum number of users that can be supported by an Access Point.…”

“…Our model is useful to predict the performance of a WLAN that implements EDCA. It can also be used for network sizing by extending the method in [8].…”

An autonomous distributed admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11 DCF

“…However, the application of these models for admission control requires an exact description of the traffic parameters such as packet arrival rate, average packet size, as well as WLAN parameters. Our previous experience [10] suggests that describing the packet stream at the link layer is difficult due to the diverse application characteristics as well as control overheads of the intermediate layers.…”

Protocol design and performance analysis for wireless networks

“…The figures show close match between the analysis and the simulation results. This analytical framework is useful for determining the number of application streams that can be supported by an access point (see for example [73]). It is also useful for admission control for quality of service demanding The numerical results presented in this subsection were computed on an Intel Pentium 4 machine; each result takes less than 30 seconds to compute.…”