Investigations of a Multi-Cell Wireless LAN Under Different Load Distributions

Abstract

Wireless local area networks are gaining popularity at unprecedented rates at homes and at offices. They do have advantages over those of different types of wired networks, especially for small application area of LANs. This thesis investigates multi cell wireless LANs under different load distributions. A model was assumed, and on the basis of this model a C++ simulation software was implemented to study the behavior of a small ad hoc wireless LAN consisting of five hosts that share the transmission media. They are distributed at different basic service sets (BSS) and each one represents an access point (AP), transmitting packets to others. The message duration and inter-arrival time units were assumed to follow exponential distribution (Probability density function). Residual errors were introduced in the channels that are due to noise, interference and other propagation effects in the software as random possibilities. The throughput and average delay per packet of the transmission medium are printed for different parameters, including the constant of the reciprocal of the probability density function (λ) of the inter-arrival time of the messages which represents the load in the wireless network simulation. The results for the throughput and the delay were found closed to the expected values using this simulation software. But the results show some limitation in the wireless control access MAC CSMA/CA protocol for the wireless LANs which is defined by the international organizations. It is recommended for further work on this field of studies to add some new statements in the CSMA/CA protocol to achieve higher utilization for the wireless LANs for small area applications, such as in homes, offices and small university campuses.