Effect of propagation environment on area throughput of dense WLAN deployments

Indoor wireless LAN deployments have become ubiquitous. As WLAN deployments become increasingly dense, WLANs start to cause more and more contention and interference to each other, to the point that they cause significant throughput degradation to other WLANs. Since WLANs are one of the most commonplace solutions to provide indoor broadband data access, it is crucial to assess the throughput limits of WLANs in order to understand at what demand level novel broadband access mechanisms will be critically needed. The amount of contention and interference that coexisting WLANs create on each other is influenced by the indoor propagation environment such as existence of walls or clutter. Although the indoor propagation environment has a significant impact on the interaction between WLANs, and consequently on the area throughput, the relationship between the indoor propagation environment and achievable area throughput has not received much attention. In this paper, we investigate the area throughput of densely deployed WLANs in different indoor propagation environments by conducting detailed MAC layer simulations using OPNET. The results show that the propagation conditions have a profound impact on achievable area throughput; as much as several tens of times increase in highly cluttered environments compared to open areas.