Stability and performance analysis of randomly deployed wireless networks

摘要

A growing demand for mobile services is taking the deployment of wireless local area networks away from the notion of carefully planned and carefully managed settings into randomly deployed and independently managed (if at all) network settings. This results in contentious networks that serve highly mobile nodes. In fact, research reveals that in most metropolitan cities in Europe and the US the size of closely located and contentious access points is overwhelmingly high (in the order of thousands). Subsequently, the performance of these networks is often unstable and unpredictable. This paper aims to investigate the extent of performance fluctuations in randomly deployed networks. It also aims to investigate the contribution of various adaptation strategies at different abstraction layers to deal with these fluctuations. We present the outcome of an exhaustive simulation for different applications, including VoIP, HTTP, and FTP. We will demonstrate that collision due to hidden-terminals is a minor influence on the performance and stability of these networks, whereas dynamic channel allocation greatly affects them. Moreover, HTTP applications are less affected by both inter- and intra-channel interferences compared with FTP and VoIP applications.