Performance model of a campus wireless LAN

Abstract

In this study we measured simulated end user HTTP response times in a 802.11g WLAN. Our results show that, ceteris paribus, modeling heavy tailed file sizes at an HTTP server, results in two times worse response times as compared to modeling Web pages of lognormal file sizes. Accesses to content containing large images and embedded documents appear to result in tolerable end user response times, as long as HTTP server directories contain a small number of such large files, that is, if file sizes are modeled by a heavy tailed Pareto distribution, where minimum file sizes are 100 Kbytes or less. When file size at the server become larger, with a minimum size of 1M bytes, response times increase substantially and may quickly become intolerable by users. Our results confirm related findings in[1] and demonstrate that studies which do not consider these findings may present too optimistic results, misrepresenting real end user delays of Web accesses. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.