On the throughput of an IEEE802.11a Wireless LAN system with terminals under heterogeneus radio conditions

We given an analysis on the throughput of WLANs, with a particular focus on the IEEE802.11a standard. Our model is a very generic one, which consists of a single access point and a number of terminals under heterogeneous radio conditions, and takes into account both the effect of collisions at the MAC layer and that of transmission errors under imperfect radio links. It is shown that both the system and individual throughputs depend very much on the packet size, the number of transmitters, the transport protocol (TCP/UDP), in addition to the radio environment and the selected transmission model. Our results help one gain a good insight into the system performance of IEEE802. 11a WLANs under various system conditions.