Effects on IEEE 802.11 MAC Throughput in Wireless LAN Over Fiber Systems

An experimental investigation of the influence of the fiber distribution of wireless LAN (WLAN) signals on throughput performance is presented. Transmission using different medium-access-control mechanisms and IEEE 802.11b and 802.11g physical layers is considered, and results are compared with those from the corresponding simulations in a commercial event-driven network simulator (OPNET). Performance of the WLAN-over-fiber network in the presence of multiple clients is also analyzed. This paper confirms that a fiber delay does not significantly affect the performance obtained by fragmentation mechanism. Furthermore, when multiple antenna units are fed by a single access point, it is demonstrated that the presence of hidden nodes can cause the performance of WLAN-over-fiber networks to deteriorate. Finally, it is shown that the request-to-send/clear-to-send mechanism can be utilized to mitigate the negative effects associated with the hidden node problem.