Modeling network bandwidth of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks

IEEE 802.11 specifies a standard for physical and MAC layers of wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, network bandwidth of an IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network, defined as an aggregated saturated throughput of the network, is studied in both cases of request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) access method and the basic method. A theoretical model for calculating the network bandwidth from signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) is proposed and it is evaluated by both simulations and experiments. The result shows that the model is very accurate in measuring or predicting the dynamical network bandwidth of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN when the SNR is higher than 2MB.