Abstract
Mobile wireless local area networks (WLANs) are becoming popular. Mobile WLANs can be composed of WiFi devices such as portable access points (APs) and portable terminals such as smartphones, tablets and any tethering devices. Several mobile WLANs are densely deployed in a conference room or café. In this case, the WLANs have to share available channels even though they suffer from interference. The interferences coming from the same channel (intra-channel contention) or a different channel (inter-channel interference) reduce the total throughput of the WLANs. This paper investigates the throughput characteristics of several densely deployed WLANs for multimedia communications. For experiments using real machines, for example, 18 sets of WLANs, the relationship among the number of WLANs, distance of WLANs, channel assignment and total throughput was revealed. Moreover, it is shown that the number of terminals in each WLAN substantially affects the total throughput because of the nature of the multi-rate and sending opportunity fairness in CSMA/CA or a performance anomaly.
