Deployment of a Reliable 802.11e Experimental Setup for Throughput Measurements

This paper describes an experimental setup for measuring the throughput of an 802.11 network that supports Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms, addressing some issues concerning the comparison between experimental and theoretical results. The setup is an ad hoc network in which the nodes implement the Multiband Atheros Driver for Wireless Fidelity (MADWiFi). There are three main contributions of this study. The first one describes the adjustments to the MADWiFi source code that guarantee the control of the QoS parameters in ad hoc mode. The second contribution aims to provide a practical method for verifying if the backoff generated by a given wireless card is uniformly distributed, as dictated by the 802.11 standard. This represents a key point when theoretical and experimental results must be compared, since many vendors adopt nonuniform backoff distributions in their commercial cards. As a third contribution, this paper presents a theoretical nonsaturated analysis that provides the throughput and the successful packet delay of an 802.11 network supporting QoS in presence of nonuniform backoff. The throughput derived from this analysis using a uniform backoff, which is included in the proposed model as a particular case, is compared to the measurements provided by the deployed setup.