ABSTRACT

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standards has been successfully deployed in a variety of home, office and corporate environments and available in various flavors like 802.11a/b/g. In this paper indepth analysis of the throughput performance and bandwidth efficiency of 802.11a standard has been investigated and compared for CSMA/CA and RTS/CTS schemes. In this paper, an analytical model based on theoretical analysis has been used to predict the throughput performance in IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g WLANs and further extended to predict the throughput performance taking into account the effect of channel conditions (FER). Results have been obtained using Matlab software which shows a superior throughput performance for 802.11a as compared to 802.11b/g using the same OFDM technology is employed for both the standards. Variation of throughput as a function of MSDU for the CSMA/CA and RTS/CTS for standard 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g reveals that throughput for CSMA/CA is greater than RTS/CTS scheme for same data rate. It has also been observed that considering physical condition i.e. FER in this case, throughput for 802.11a/b/g standards decreases with increasing FER when data rate is kept constant.