An evaluation of the performance of IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g wireless local area networks in a corporate office environment

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the development of standards for wireless local area networks. In particular, IEEE´s 802.11a and 802.11g both employ coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) but operate in different frequency bands. In this paper, the performance and relative merits of 802.11a and 802.11g are compared for the scenario of a corporate office wireless LAN application. It is shown that for comparable scenarios 802.11g achieves superior range but that 802.11a achieves higher data rates. Thus the two standards are found to have complimentary strengths and weaknesses.