Improvement of Throughput Prediction Method for Access Point in Multi-rate WLANs Considering Media Access Control and Frame Collision

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard have been spreading rapidly. Access Points (AP) are being established in various public places, such as railway stations and airports, as well as private residences. Moreover, the rate of public WLAN services continues to increase. Here the throughput prediction of an AP in a multi-rate environment (amount of receipt data including retransmission packets at an AP) is an important issue for wireless network design, and it is important to solve AP placement and selection problems. To realize the prediction of throughput, the authors have proposed an AP throughput prediction method that considers terminal distribution. We compared the predicted throughput of the proposed method with a method that uses linear order computation and confirmed the performance of the proposed method. However, the results did not show the effectiveness of the proposed method in realistic network environments. Here we compare the throughput obtained from the network simulator NS2 with the prediction value calculated by the proposed method. Simulation results show that the maximum relative error of the proposed method is approximately 6%.