Modelling Chain for Throughput Estimation in Wireless Networks

The motivation for our work was a feasibility study of the use of wireless technologies, more concretely IEEE 802.11, in industrial control systems. The considered application for configuration files upload to a system component puts requirements on the throughput of the established connection. To estimate the TCP throughput under the large range of varying conditions an analytical model has been developed. The applied approach is a feed-forward modelling chain, where the complex behavior of the communication system is split into several sub-models that are tied together by the overall model design. Defining multiple sub-models enables their individual development primarily with the purpose of complex reduction. The developed model allows to take into account a variety of parameters, such as distance between a transmitter and a receiver, channel conditions, modulation schemes, in-bound interference, cross-traffic from other users etc. Analytical results are compared with the simulation results (using ns-2 simulator) and measurement results (obtained from a specially constructed test-bed).