Performance Evaluation of Wired and Wireless Local Area Networks

–Very large scale integration of complex circuits on to a smaller chip demands for the evolution of high speed computer networks. The traditional wired network constraints like mobility and expensive cabling. But wireless communication is a flexible data communication system implemented as an extension to or as an alternative for wired communication. The bandwidth and the services provided by the wireless communication networks are similar to that provided by the wired networks. Computing the viability and performance of computer networks in real can be very expensive task. In this paper, performance of wireless and wired networks as well as comparison is evaluated using OPNET simulation tool. For wired network, collision count, traffic received, delay, throughput is studied while for wireless network, data dropped, traffic received, media access delay, and throughput is studied. For comparison of both wired and wireless networks, the performance parameters throughput is investigated. All these performance is carried out by varying number of users. Keywords—Ethernet, WLAN, OPNET, Throughput, Delay