1An Empirical Characterization of Instantaneous Throughput in 802.11b WLANs

Abstract — We present an empirical, i.e, measurement-based, characterization of the instantaneous throughput of a station in an 802.11b WLAN as a function of the number of competing stations sharing the access point. Our method-ology is applicable to practically any wireless MAC protocol. Our findings show that as the number of stations increases, the overall throughput decreases and its variance increases. Furthermore, the per-station performance depends signifi-cantly on the wireless card implementation and does not de-pend as much on the station’s processing capacity. I