An Empirical Characterization of Instantaneous Throughput in 802.11b WLANs
Abstract
We present an empirical, i.e, measurement-based, characterization of the
instantaneous throughput of a station in an 802.11b WLAN as a function of
the number of competing stations sharing the access point. Our methodology
is applicable to practically any wireless MAC protocol. Our findings show
that as the number of stations increases, the overall throughput decreases
and its variance increases. Furthermore, the per-station performance
depends significantly on the wireless card implementation and does not
depend as much on the station's processing capacity.
UMIACS-TR-2002-69