Metamodeling of Wi-Fi Performance

The increasing popularity of Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) networks at home, in public areas and in the enterprise motivates extensive modeling and analysis of their performance measures, such as network capacity, resource requirements and quality of service (QoS) capabilities. Some of the easier performance problems can be solved by analytical modeling methods, but most of the complicated ones, involving too many factors from multiple layers, can only be answered through validated simulation models. However, an explicit mathematic model is always the most effective way to represent the system behavior and the most convenient basis for performance optimization. Here, we first advocate the application of metamodeling techniques to performance studies of Wi-Fi networks, in order to find usable, if approximate, closed-form mathematical models. Subsequently, we formulate a general metamodeling framework for Wi-Fi networks. Our results in two relevant case studies, after applying this framework, support the validity of our metamodeling methodology: our capacity metamodel for 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) is validated by a well-known analytical model and displays an interesting log-linear relationship between capacity and number of users; our voice over Wi-Fi admission capacity metamodel gives a much tighter bound than bounds existing in the literature and composes a more practical admission control scheme. Our work, therefore, points out a new direction for future performance studies of Wi-Fi networks.