Capacity Measurement in Communication Networks

Abstract- The capacity of the communication network is a key metric for both network planning and management, and performance assessment of applications that take advantage of the network. Several tools for capacity measurement are present in literature, which provide satisfying results when used in wired networks. On the contrary, they provide inaccurate results on wireless networks. The paper presents a refined study of processing times at each protocol layer, which suggests that capacity estimates provided by the existing tools are affected by a systematic error. A suitable measurement methodology and a related testbed are proposed to experimentally validate the theoretical results. The experimental outcomes demonstrate the validity of the study, and permit to explain why existing tools are inaccurate on wireless links. I