Guideline for Wireless Network Analysis

Though greatly in use, today's Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are far from optimised. The limitation for Access Point (AP) operators to manage and optimise WLAN performance is that current 802.11 standards do not allow AP and clients to share channel information, environmental data, and performance statistics. In order to assist the
AP operators to evaluate their network performance and delivered quality, this thesis has proposed an estimate system utilizing AP measurements. The estimate system accurately models the MAC-Layer behavior of an 802.1 1b network and efficiently calculates the WLAN performance taking into account transmission errors and active rates.
Furthermore, the work performed has studied methods on how to improve the estimate system with client information, which may become available to the AP in the near future,
due to the release of the 802.11k standard. This thesis also explored the dependence of the WLAN performance on various network parameters such as bit error rate and
network size, and provides suggestions for WLAN planning base on this dependence.