Net Throughput with IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

The throughput for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs has been evaluated with respect to various kinds of overhead. The impact of several sources of overhead has been modeled. Sources include gap time, preamble, PHY (physical layer), MAC (medium access layer) and TCP/IP header fields, ACK (acknowledgement) and request frames. After measurement of the net throughput and detailed monitoring of actual exhange of frames, this modeling has been refined. A close fit is found between the results for IEEE 802.11b obtained from this model and as measured using currently available 2.4 GHz products. Therefore it is expected that throughput from 5 GHz IEEE 802.11a products currently in development ca be accurately predicted using this model.