Performance Evaluation of Wired and Wireless Local Area Networks

Very large scale integration of complex circuits on to a smaller chip demands for the evolution of high speed computer networks. The traditional wired network constraints like mobility and expensive cabling. But wireless communication is a flexible data communication system implemented as an extension to or as an alternative for wired communication. The bandwidth and the services provided by the wireless communication networks are similar to that provided by the wired networks. Computing the viability and performance of computer networks in real can be very expensive task. In this paper, performance of wireless and wired networks as well as comparison is evaluated using OPNET simulation tool. For wired network, collision count, traffic received, delay, throughput is studied while for wireless network, data dropped, traffic received, media access delay, and throughput is studied. For comparison of both wired and wireless networks, the performance parameters throughput is investigated. All these performance is carried out by varying number of users. Keywords—Ethernet, WLAN, OPNET, Throughput, Delay I. INTRODUCTION Networks (Wired and Wireless) have grown like weed over the past few decades providing a pace to the means of accessing network resources. Therefore, it is vital to have an accurate and a reliable generic platform to enable network. The wired Networks provide a secure and faster means of connectivity. The performance of the wired Ethernet is very sensitive to the number of users, offered load, transmission links while wireless is also very sensitive to the number of users, offered load as well as physical characteristics, data rate, packet size and so on. We can compare wired and wireless networks in the area of installation, cost, reliability, performance, security, mobility. As networks are being upgraded from scratch all over the word, network planning is becoming most important. Computing the viability and performance of networks in real can be very expensive and painstaking task. To ease and comfort the process of estimating and predicting a network techniques are widely used and put into practice. A variety of simulation tools like Qualnet, NS2, Netsim and OPNET are available for the purpose of modelling and simulation but the choice of a simulator depends upon the features available and requirements of network application. Among the various network simulators OPNET provides the industry's leading environment for network modelling and simulation. It allows to design and study communication networks, devices, protocols, and applications with flexibility and scalability. It provides object oriented modelling approach and graphical editors that mirror the structure of actual networks and network components. The analysis helped to estimate and optimize the performance of wired and wireless networks using proposed optimization techniques (1). This paper has been organized as follows: Part I deals with Introduction, Part II and Part III deal with the brief description of IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.3, Part IV deals with the simulation set-up and result with the performance metrics being focused upon and in the last section the paper has been concluded.