Measurement in 802.11 Wireless Networks and its Applications

Ease of deployment, wireless connectivity and ubiquitous mobile on-the-go computing has made the IEEE 802.11 the most widely deployed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard in the world. The wireless channel is fundamentally different to its wired counterpart and exhibit characteristics which are difficult to model. We therefore revert to measurement based characterization of wireless networks. A wireless network testbed was thus developed using off-the-shelf wireless cards. Available bandwidth measurement is particularly challenging in the wireless environment because of adaptive data rates, a time varying channel, and CSMA/CA based contention instead of simple FIFO queueing. We present and experimentally evaluate a novel available bandwidth estimation scheme, ‘SPEEDO’, for 802.11 networks in infrastructure mode, based on passive monitoring, without any need for access point cooperation or protocol modifications. An ability to accurately classify observed packet e...

• Type: Thesis
• Year: 2010
• Where: The University of Melbourne
• Authors: Malik Ahmad Yar Khan
• Keywords: Available Bandwidth, Map Tool, Network Measurements, Rate Adaptation Algorithms, SmartRate, Speedo, Wireless Networks