Experimental Study of a Wireless Local Area Network

In this paper, we report on the field measurements of the signal strength received at the user end from an access point in a given wireless local area network. The network established for Internet access in indoor environment is based on IEEE802.11g standard operating at 2.4 GHz license-exempt band. Signal strength measurements were recorded at two slightly different positions of the user equipment. This gives two different orientations of the antenna fitted in the user equipment with respect to the access point. Two sets of measurements were recorded over observation intervals of 60 seconds and 240 seconds. Analysis of the results show that there are significant fluctuations in the received signal strength at a given position from the access point in time domain. An examination of the results reveals that large fluctuations cause frequent link drops and therefore heavy packet loss. These wide variations cause degraded performance in terms of the overall throughput available to the end user. An estimated map of the signal strength prior to fixing of the access point may be an appropriate option for obtaining good performance of an access network.