WLANs: Making M-Commerce Transactions Feasible

The wireless networking industry today is seeing unprecedented growth. Just as in the case of the Internet, most of this growth can be directly attributed to the promise of m-commerce or business with mobile clients. Customers are expected to connect to the Internet via wireless "hot spots that are more often than not public access 802.11 WLANs. While the potential of this proposition is undeniable, the Holy Grail of doing business any place, any time still seems to elude us. With the realization that the feasibility of m-commerce depends on reliable and more importantly, pervasive Internet access, this thesis focuses on the problem of providing such access to mobile clients accessing the 802.11 WLAN based hot spots. It proposes a new routing protocol, the AP-based Limited-hop Routing Protocol (ALHRP) that tries to address this issue. It describes in detail the simulation of this protocol, critically analyzing its usability within the context of performing business transactions over wireless. Experimental results show that ALHRP performs its designated task. They also show that higher layer protocols that were designed for wired networks do not work scale well in highl