Analysis of saturation throughput and delay of IEEE802.11b WLANs using various algorithms

Wireless communications is, by any measure, the fastest growing segment of the communications industry. IEEE 802.11b (also referred to as 802.11 High Rate or Wi-Fi) is an extension to 802.11 that applies to wireless LANS and provides 11 Mbps transmission in the 2.4 GHz band. IEEE 802.11 allows for fragmentation tuning and rate selection to achieve highest throughput. Fragmentation is the process by which 802.11 frames are partitioned into smaller fragments that are transmitted separately to the destination. The destination station reassembles the fragments back into the original frame. Throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks in terms of throughput and packet delay using two different algorithms Constant contention window and Binary Exponential Back-off and also to determine the optimal Fragment size and Contention window that improves the throughput and delay over fading channels.