Highlights
Your work must be presented in the form of a short technical paper and be no longer than 7 sides plus a facing-page that includes the abstract, but excluding the appendix and references. This should be printed on A4 paper and use a font size no smaller than 10. A mark penalty of -10%/additional page will be applied for submissions longer than required. For completeness, you must include a detailed table of results within an appendix (not included in page count). You may if you wish to include further additional material in an appendix but this will not contribute to the marks and you should not explicitly refer to any appendix to illustrate results etc. You could use an appendix to present a full derivation of the formula.
Introduction
You are to perform a study on data throughput in 802.11 WLAN systems. This will be carried out with wireless security protocols in place and removed. The study will be partially theoretical and partially practical requiring you to build a theoretical model describing data throughput and verify this model through practical experimentation.
802.11 standards are often characterized by channel bit rates, for example, 802.11b is usually described as supporting a bit rate of 11Mbps. WLAN users will notice that actual data throughput, as perceived by the clients on a WLAN only approaches half of this value and is sometimes even less. Implementing secure communications on the wireless link will reduce apparent throughput further. Users will sometimes put this lower actual bit rate down to underperforming systems, but this is usually not the case. The lower throughput rate is primarily due to the MAC and physical layer overheads in the 802.11 architecture and is therefore intentional. Security protocols place additional overhead on communications and further reduce apparent throughput rates. Communication between a wireless client and an access point is governed by a strict set of protocols that introduces fixed delays in the communication channel. Indeed the delays do not change significantly despite faster underlying channel bit rates.
You are to examine one of 802.11b, 802.11g or 802.11a standards. You can choose which one you prefer to work with, however, you must state clearly in your report which standard you are focussing on. Additionally, you must apply one method of secure wireless communications from WEP, WPA1/2 Personal to understand the overhead incurred.
Theoretical model
You will need to do some background research to examine how other authors have developed throughput models. The following two papers are a good start:
Here you need to develop a model to allow you to calculate actual data throughput against the underlying data rate. You need to plot this data for a number of packet sizes. Additionally, you need to provide the data in tabular form as part of an excel spreadsheet within the Appendix.
Practical work
You need to perform a number of experiments to measure actual throughput rates for a system using physical experiments or a network simulator of your choice (OMNET++ or OPNET or any other suitable simulator). You are required to measure data throughput using an access point supporting the 802.11 mode (a, b or g) you chose to investigate. For practical experiments, throughput can be measured using JPERF and IPERF traffic generation software or the more sophisticated ZTI traffic generator. Wireless traffic (i.e. traffic through the air between the AP and WNIC) needs to be monitored using Omnipeek or AirPCap on a probe WNIC. For simulation environments, select appropriate configurations and parameters to obtains the throughput results.
Throughput measurements should be taken for the maximum speed available for your chosen standard. You will need to analyze the data collected carefully and compare your observations with the theoretical predictions you have developed.
Additionally, you need to measure throughput with your chosen security mechanism implemented on the wireless link. You should end up with a set of results, one with security on and one with security off, so you can make clear comparisons of your observations.
Before carrying out any throughput measurements you should assess the channel busyness using a Channelizer Pro spectrum analyzer. Chose the quietest channel available for your work. You need to comment in your results and discussion section on the impact of interference and other Wi-Fi transmissions on the same channel.
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