Behavior of UDP-based applications over IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to characterize the behavior of the UDP transport protocol, mainly in terms of throughput and average delay, over an IEEE 802.11b compliant wireless local area network (WLAN) from an experimental approach. Although performance evaluation of these kinds of LAN is being extensively discussed in the current literature, most of these studies are analytical or simulation-based and they do not consider the influence of channel impairments or link quality over network throughput. After an exhaustive measurement campaign, different performance parameters such as throughput, goodput, effective goodput, frame error rate, IT loss rate, delay and jitter have been obtained. This could be a preliminary analysis of the behavior of real-time traffic over WLAN infrastructures, such as streaming audio and voice transmission, services that are expected to undergo substantial growth in the coming years. All these studies and results have been developed in the context of the WINE (Wireless Internet Networks) project belonging to the framework of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme, addressed to enhancing the performance of TCP/IP protocol over WLAN such as IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth and HIPERLAN/2.