MODELLING AND SIMULATION OF LOCAL AREA WIRELESS CHANNELS FOR WLAN PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

The wide-spread adoption of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) operating at the unlicensed ISM frequency bands is one of the few highlights of communication technologies in recent years. Several WLAN configurations have been implemented in the operational environment with each one providing different Quality of Service. There is requirement to measure and relatively grade the performance of a WLAN connect. This paper adapts and implements a WLAN system channel model so as to obtain simulation results about Quality of Service with varying channel conditions and also to analyze the performance of one of the most widely deployed WLAN based on IEEE 802.11a standard. The channel adaptation process essentially captures the propagation characteristics of a typical WLAN enabled office ranging from a small room to a medium size shop floor. Matlab & Simulink ® has been chosen as the modelling tool because of its flexibility and mathematical simulation capabilities. The results obtained with varying channel conditions represented by typical models are indicative of performance of OFDM in different environments and clearly show that certain channels are better than the others and will help in evolving signal power benchmark for effective communication