A Comparative Performance Evaluation Study of IEEE 802.3 Wired and IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs for Multimedia Data Traffic

Cüneyt Bayılmış, İsmail Ertürk, Celal Çeken

Department of Electronics and Computer Education,
Kocaeli University, 41380, Izmit, TURKEY
{bayilmis, erturk, cceken} @kou.edu.tr

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) called often Ethernet on air are a type of existing LANs communicating over wireless media. By removal of cables in communication, flexibility especially desired for the mobile end user applications has been aimed. In this study, fundamental characteristics of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN predominantly deployed nowadays, and types thereof are investigated. An IEEE 802.3 LAN (Ethernet) is compared to a WLAN that runs under the same data traffic loads as the wired LAN and communicates according to IEEE 802.11b standard. Both the wired LAN and WLAN models are realized using a commercially available simulation tool named OPNET with Radio Module. Having simulated the models, end-to-end packet delay and packet delay variation results for the multimedia data traffic are presented together with the performance comparisons.

Keywords: WLAN, LAN, multimedia data traffic, performance evaluation