Performance evaluation of heterogeneous wireless local area networks

The overall market for wireless local area networks (WLANs) grew more than 200% from 2000 to 2002, and will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23% until 2007. The objective of this research was to assess the performance of commercial-off-the-shelf WLAN systems with respect to interoperability, roaming ability, power consumption, throughput, and range. The evaluation was performed on both homogeneous and heterogeneous WLAN systems. Experimental test results indicate that the fundamental components of a WLAN system (i.e. access points and radio cards) and their combinations, significantly affect performance with respect to range, throughput, and power consumption. No significant differences in performance were observed in the WLAN systems with respect to interoperability (i.e. all systems characterized proved to be fully interoperable) or roaming (i.e. all combinations of access points and radio cards were able to seamlessly roam).