— The wireless LAN technology 802.11, also called Wi-Fi, offers high speed wireless Internet access for local area environments. WLANs provide much higher data rates than the mobile 2.5G and 3G networks and are relatively cheap and easy to install and maintain. Consequently, the popularity of WLANs has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years and WLAN technology has become a viable alternative to 2.5/3G mobile networks in providing Internet access in densely populated urban areas. The physical characteristics of a WLAN introduce range limitations and unreliable media, dynamic topologies where stations move about, interference from outside sources, and lack of the ability for every device to hear every other device within the WLAN. Due to these limitations service providers are faced with the problem to select and dimension the infrastructure of their WLAN networks caused by difficulties in performance evaluation. The main barrier, however, to the sustained growth of the...
Sandjai Bhulai, Robert D. van der Mei, Taoying Yua