IEEE 802.11b Performance Evaluation: Convergence of Theoretical, Simulation and Experimental Results

The paper presents the analysis of the evaluation of the maximum goodput achievable in a IEEE 802.11b Basic Set Service (BSS) performed by means of theoretical, simulative and experimental approaches. With respect to previous works on this topic, the presented study focuses on the comparison of the results obtained using the different approaches, highlighting their convergence in the simple case of ideal radio channel. The assumption of an ideal channel, although not always verified in real scenarios, is useful to evaluate the upper bound of the network capacity offered by this technology in absence of losses and performance degradations due to factors not directly related to the protocol. Furthermore, the adopted simulation tool has been preventively validated versus theoretical results under varying working conditions and for different physical layers. It is noteworthy that the results obtained by each one of the three approaches are in accordance with those already presented in literature, although they are derived by means of different tools, thus further confirming the accuracy of such results.