Evaluation Analysis of the Performance of IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.

11g Standards
Evangelos Topalis Antonis Athanasopoulos PostDoc Researcher Research Fellow athan@ee.upatras.gr topalis@ee.upatras.gr Christos Antonopoulos Research Fellow cantonop@ee.upatras.gr Stavros Koubias Professor koubias@ee.upatras.gr

Applied Electronics Laboratory, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Patras, Greece

Abstract
The IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN standard is one of the most popular wireless standards in the market today. Since 1997 when the first version of the IEEE 802.11 was launched in the market, a lot of different versions has been announced and developed. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation analysis of the IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g has been carried out, examining the performance of both standards at the MAC sub-layer, in terms of QoS, using two different simulation tools. Finally, the comparison for both cases is discussed.

1. Introduction
During the last few years, wireless communications have gained a great part in the market of communications, offering very important development perspectives in mobile telephony, wireless Internet and generally in wireless LANs. Nowadays, WLANs can support a variety of industrial and home automation applications. Wireless LANs can be categorized according to the extent of their covering area into: Wireless Local Area Networks-WLANs Wireless Wide Area Networks-WWANs Wireless Personal Area Networks-WPANs. A wireless LAN is a very flexible structure for data communications, which might be implemented either as an alternative of a wired LAN (within a building or a geographical region) or as an extension providing some extra coverage area between a wired backbone network and a mobile user carrying some wireless apparatus. Also, WLANs are divided into two main categories depending on the topology architecture: The AP (Access Point) infrastructured WLANs and the adhoc WLANs. The AP-infrastructured WLANs

architecture, is based on at least one AP providing a server function. All kind of communication between all wireless nodes should pass through this AP. This AP might be connected to a wired backbone network as well. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are autonomous networks consisting of routing nodes (or some routing nodes with other nodes that do not route) that are free to move about. They may be connected to a larger network e.g. the Internet, or operate as an isolated intra-network. Summarizing, the term wireless networking refers to technology that enables two or more computers/devices to communicate using standard network protocols, but without network cabling. Strictly speaking, any technology that does this could be called wireless networking. The current buzzword however generally refers to wireless LANs. This technology, fuelled by the emergence of cross-vendor industry, has produced a number of affordable wireless solutions, such as IEEE 802.11 [1], [2], Bluetooth and HomeRF standards. A major obstacle for deployment of wireless networks is the existence of multiple standards. Currently, WLANs are mostly based on the IEEE 802.11 standard. More specific, most of the applications, products and research today, regarding wireless solutions, are making use of 802.11b or 802.11g protocols. During the past years, a lot of research has been carried out, in order to evaluate the performance, regarding the MAC access methods, of the wireless standards developed [3], [4]. In [5], the impact of various key parameters (i.e.RTS/CTS) on the actual performance of 802.11b wireless LAN protocol was verified. Furthermore, a lot of effort has been put aiming useful enhancements for the published standards [6] [9]. In general, the outcome in all cases turns to be that, depending on the application, a specific MAC protocol has to be used.

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In this article, several simulation tests were carried out, examining the performance of both protocols. The performed simulations were undergone using two different simulation tools: a) the wireless C++ simulator [10] and b) the OPNET v.11.0 [11]. A comprehensive analysis of the results is given below. Furthermore, a comparison of the results obtained, between the two simulation tools has been carried out. The structure of the paper is organized as follows: Chapter 2 is an overview about the several IEEE 802.11 versions. Also, a small description of the MAC layer of both IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g is given. The next section, Chapter 3, includes the simulations as well as the results obtained. Moreover, discussion on the results is provided. Finally, Chapter 4 has the general conclusions of the work.

IEEE 802.11h: 802.11a s spectrum management (DCS, Dynamic Channel Selection and TPC, Transmit Power Control) IEEE 802.11i: MAC enhancements for better data security.

2.1 The 802.11b: An overview

The IEEE802.11b standard defines 3 different Physical layers providing different data rates. The three PHY kinds are: a) the FHSS, b) the DSSS and c) the IR. Both FHSS and DSSS use the ISM 2,4GHz frequency band. The FHSS uses 79 channels separated with a 1MHz from each other, adopting the GMSK. The offered bandwidth is 1 or 2Mbps depending upon the GMSK. The DSSS uses exactly the same frequency spectrum with DBPSK coding for the 1Mbps and DQPSK for 2Mbps. Finally, the IR designed mostly for indoor applications. Recently, a proposal for higher data rates (i.e. 5,5Mbps and 11Mbps) was adopted. This was achieved by using a different coding technique, the Direct Sequence/Pulse Position Modulation (DS/PPM) The IEEE 802.11b MAC architecture is shown in Fig.1. The MAC sub-layer defines two access coordination mechanisms, the basic Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), which is mandatory and the optional Point Coordination Function (PCF). Networks that are making use of both DCF and PCF functions support two kinds of transmissions: asynchronous and synchronous.

2. IEEE 802.11 Wireless Standards

In 1997, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created the first WLAN standard. They called it 802.11 after the name of the group formed to oversee its development. Unfortunately, 802.11 only supported a maximum bandwidth of 2 Mbps - too slow for most applications. For this reason, ordinary 802.11 wireless products are no longer being manufactured. Since then, many versions of the initial standard have been launched. A very brief description of each version is given below: IEEE 802.11a: This standard supports higher data rates, compared to the other 802.11 versions, by using OFDM modulation in the frequency band of the 5.7 GHz. The data rates vary from 6 to 54 Mbps. IEEE 802.11b: This is the most popular standard of all 802.11 versions. It was published in September 1999. An analytical description lies in the next paragraph. IEEE 802.11c: Offers 802.11 frame bridging functionality. IEEE 802.11d: Further extensions, in order the standard to work in other frequency bands. IEEE 802.11e: It provides QoS support at the MAC layer, even with the basic/mandatory access mechanism (EDCF, Enhanced DCF HCF, Hybrid Coordination Function) IEEE 802.11f: Suggested practice for IAPP (Inter Access Point) Protocol. IEEE 802.11g: A 802.11b extension, supporting higher data rates. It is described in more detail in paragraph 2.2.

Point Coordination Function (PCF)

MAC Extent

Distributed Coordination Function (DCF)

Figure 1. IEEE 802.11b MAC architecture Asynchronous transmission is provided by DCF, which is basically a CSMA/CA access method, while synchronous transmission provided by PCF follows a round-robin polling-based access mechanism.

Figure 2. RTS/CTS access mechanism

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The basic DCF is CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance). Carrier sensing is performed using physical carrier sensing (by air interface) as well as virtual carrier sensing. Virtual carrier sensing uses the duration of the packet transmission, which is included in the header of RTS, CTS, and DATA frames, Fig.2. The channel is considered to be busy if either physical or virtual carrier sensing indicates that the channel is busy. When a station wants to transmit a packet, it needs to sense the channel. If the channel is idle in DIFS interval. Then, the station sends a RTS. After it receives a CTS from the receiver, the sender will send a data frame after waiting SIFS. If the sender receives an ACK from the receiver, the transmission is successful. In the meantime, other stations just wait a NAV (Network Allocation Vector) time, which indicates the remaining time of the on-going transmission sessions. Using the duration information in RTS, CTS and Data frames, stations update their NAVs whenever they receive a frame. When the sender finds the medium is busy, the sender waits a back-off window. The length of the back-off window is considered to be a counter. The station will try to retransmit when the counter reaches zero. This technique aims to the elimination of the hidden node problem.

As it was stated above, at the MAC layer the CTS-to-self mechanism is used. The main goal of this mechanism is to reduce the overhead caused in the network due to RTS/CTS signaling sequence. Unlike the RTS/CTS, CTS-to-self cannot eliminate the hidden node problem the wireless networks suffer, unless all stations are within the transmitting nodes range. A short description of the CTS-to-self technique is given below: Assume that Wireless Station 1 has data to send to Station 2, Fig. 3. Wireless Station 1 sends a CTS frame. This frame is received from all stations lie within WS1 coverage area (i.e WS2 and WS3). If all stations are inside WS1 coverage area then no collision will occur, but if a number of stations are outside WS1 coverage a collision is most likely to occur.

Figure 3. CTS-to-self mechanism

2.2 The 802.11g: An overview

The 802.11g is a kind of hybrid of 802.11a and 802.11b. The new features of the 802.11g standard are dealing with the release of a new Physical layer, the support of preamble type as well as the MAC CTS-toself new protection mechanism. The 802.11g uses the same transmission technology found in 802.11a, which is called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). This increases the amount of data transmitted in a given time slice (i.e. higher data rates). However, unlike 802.11a, which operates in a 5GHz band, 802.11g uses carrier frequency bands that are around 802.11b's 2.4GHz primary carrier frequency. More precisely, this standard supports the following PHY layers: ERP-DSSS/CCK (mandatory) ERP-OFDM (mandatory) ERP-DSSS/PBCC (optional) DSSS-OFDM (optional) The ERP-OFDM is the new mandatory physical layer introduced by 802.11g. With the OFDM technique IEEE 802.11as data rates are provided at the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band.

2.3 Working in harmony

The 802.11g also offers backward compatibility with 802.11b, so that somebody hopefully won't have to toss all the 802.11b gear he has accumulated. Computers or terminals set up for 802.11g can fall back to speeds of 11 Mbps. This feature makes 802.11b and 802.11g devices compatible within a single network. Modification of an 802.11b access point to 802.11g compliance usually involves only a firmware upgrade. But compatibility still remains a large question mark across the gamut of 802.11b products. The promise of 802.11g is that it will deliver 802.11a-like data rates, with 802.11b's better transmit distances, and handling of reflections and occlusions. And because it works in the same 2.4GHz frequency, it ought to allow easier interoperability between 802.11b and 802.11g.

3. Simulation Results
The purpose of our simulations is to examine and evaluate the performance of both standards under the same topology and traffic scenarios, in terms of MAC

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layers QoS parameters, such as Throughput, Bandwidth Utilization and Media Access Delay. This statistic contains the delay of a packet from the time it is picked up from the transmitter until it is successfully received from the receiver. The following lines specify the parameters set, regarding the configuration of the topology and traffic scenarios for the performed simulations. The simulation time was set be 150 seconds. All cases involved ten (10) wireless nodes. When using 802.11b the RTS/CTS mechanism was used while for the 802.11g case the CTS-to-self technique. The packet length was 8000bits (~1024bytes) and the RTS threshold 2000bits (a quarter of the packet length). Several distributions dealing with the packet generation rate (i.e. constant, Poisson etc) and length (constant, exponential etc) were used. The Data Rate was set to be equal for both standards because the scope of this paper is to examine the performance of the MAC layer under the same data rate conditions (11Mbps). The following sets of figures depict the simulation results obtained from the wireless C++ simulator. All nodes are within the coverage area of each other, hence there are no hidden nodes.
Netw ork Utilisation 0.68 0.65 0.62 0.59 0.56 0.53 0 20 40 60 80 100 Tim e (sec) 120 140

Network Throughput
7800
Throughput (bps)

7300 6800 6300 5800 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 Tim e (sec)

802.11g 802.11b

Figure 6. Mean network throughput Observing Fig. 4, it is more than obvious that the network capacity in terms of BW Utilization is higher when the 802.11g protocol was used. This can be easily explained due to the RTS/CTS exchange signaling, which adds some extra overhead to the network. Hence, the difference between the two protocols in terms of network utilization is approximately 19.6%. Taking into account the above condition, degradation to the system throughput, when the network uses the 802.11b MAC layer is expected. Figure 6 confirms that estimation. Arithmetically speaking, the calculated difference of the mean network throughput among the two protocols is approximately 30.5%. Furthermore, Fig. 5 displays the average media access delay of each node. There is no doubt that 802.11g performs better due to shorter delays. Summing up, 802.11g performs better at all three metrics chosen for the MAC layer evaluation. Thus, better QoS can be delivered compared to the 802.11b. The next sequence of simulations, involves hidden nodes. The network topology is shown in Fig. 7. It has to be mentioned that the coverage area of each node was set to be 300m. All the other simulation parameters remained as described previously. Table 1 shows which nodes are hidden from each wireless station. This table arises from the calculated distances between the nodes, in accordance to the topology pattern. Table 1. Hidden nodes

BW Utilisation

802.11g

802.11b

Figure 4. Network utilization

Media Access Delay
14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Wireless Nodes

Delay (msec)

802.11g
802.11b

Wireless Nodes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 4, 5 1, 8

Hidden Nodes 3, 4, 5, 6, 10

1, 2, 7, 8, 9 1, 2, 7, 8, 9 1, 8 4, 5 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 4, 5, 10 1, 8, 9

Figure 5. Media access delay

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Figure 7. Topology pattern The next figure presents the network capacity measured in bandwidth utilization units.
802.11b

The mean difference between the two standards for this scenario is approximately 30.02%. The following set of figures, features the results obtained from the simulation tests undergone by the simulator OPNET v.11.0. The QoS metrics compared for the purposes of our study are network throughput and media access delay. Commenting on Fig. 10 and Fig. 11, where the network topology deals with nodes in LOS exclusively, it can be observed that the network using the 802.11g characteristics performs better than the one using the 802.11b. This outcome confirms the observation concluded by the results obtained during the first part of our simulations.

Network Utilisation
0.6

802.11g

BW Utilisation

0.55 0.5 0.45 0.4 0 30 60 90 120 150

Time (sec)

Figure 10. 802.11b Network throughput & delay

Figure 8. Network utilization Examining the above figure it can be seen that the hidden node problem has degraded the 802.11g network performance in terms of bandwidth utilization. The 802.11b performs better when the hidden node problem occurs. This is because the RTS/CTS signaling exchange avoids in a great degree possible packet collisions compared to CTS-to-self MAC mechanism used by 802.11g. In order to be more precise the difference between the two cases is approximately 29.8%. The above situation results to a poor IEEE 802.11g throughput performance compared to IEEE 802.11b. This can be also seen in Fig. 9.
Network Throughput
802.11b

Figure 11. 802.11g Network throughput & delay The two following figures (Fig. 12 and Fig. 13) are the results produced by OPNET when the topology pattern of Fig. 7 and Table 1 was used. At this case the hidden node problem has to be taken into the account.

802.11g

Throughput (kbps)

6000 5700 5400 5100 4800 4500 0 30 60 90 120 150 Tim e (sec)

Figure 9. Network throughput

Figure 12. 802.11b Network throughput & delay

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5. References
[1] IEEE 802.11 WG, Reference number ISO/IEC 880211:1999(E) IEEE Std 802.11, 1999 edition, International Standard [for] Information Technology Telecommunications and information exchange between systems-Local and metropolitan area networks-Specific Requirements Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications, 1999 [2] IEEE 802.11gTM 2003 [amendment to IEEE Std IEEE 802.11TM , 1999 edition (Reaff 2003)]

Figure 13. 802.11g Network throughput & delay Comparing Fig. 10 to Fig. 12, it is clearly seen that the 802.11bs network performance is not affected by the hidden node problem due to the RTS/CTS MAC protection mechanism. On the other hand, 802.11gs network performance, in terms of QoS characteristics such as throughput and media access delay, seems to degrade when hidden nodes exist. Even a quick view at Fig. 11 and Fig. 13 reveals a lot higher media access delay and lower system throughput. The reason of those poor characteristics is the CTS-to-self mechanism implemented at MAC level. As it was mentioned before, the comparison of the standards was carried out using two different simulation tools: the C++ Wireless Simulator and the OPNET v.11.0. In general, the results derived from both tools were the same, under the same topology patterns and almost same traffic conditions. The small deviation observed, must be ought to possible different implementations of the protocols for each simulation tool.

[3] Shreyas Sadalgi, A Performance Analysis of the Basic Access IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN MAC Protocol (CSMA/CA)[Online].Available:http://paul.rutgers.edu/~sad algi/network.pdf [4] Dimitris Vassis, George Kormentzas, Angelos Rouskas and Ilias Maglogiannis, The IEEE 802.11g Standard for High Data Rate WLANs, IEEE Network May/June 2005 [5] Y. Zahur, M. Doctor, S. Davari, T.A. Yang 802.11b Performance Evaluation, Communications, Internet, and Information Technology, CIIT 2003, 11/17/2003 11/19/2003, Scottsdale, AZ, USA [6] Qiang Ni, et al. A Survey of QoS Enhancements for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN, Journal of Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing, Wiley 2004, Issue 5 [7] Hossam Hassanein et al. Infrastructure-based MAC in wireless mobile ad-hoc networks, Elsevier B.V, Journal Ad Hoc Networks 2004 [8] Anders Lindgren et al. QoS Schemes for IEEE802.11 A Simulation Study, Mobile Nets & Applicattions 8, 223235, 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers [9] Kil-Woong Jang, Sung-Ho Hwang, and Ki-Jun Han A Dynamic Backoff Scheme to Guarantee QoS over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks EurAsia-ICT 2002, LNCS 2510, pp. 624-631, 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002 [10] Pythagor Simulation Tool, http//www.icsd.aegean.gr/ [11] OPNET v.11.0 PL1, http//www.opnet.com

4. Conclusions
By making a detail study analysis of the results obtained from the wireless C++ simulator and OPNET, some comments can be made. The 802.11b seems to have the same performance with both topology and traffic scenarios, while the 802.11g seems to perform poorly when hidden nodes are involved into the topology scenario. This observation matches with the expectations arise from the theoretical part of this paper and the descriptions of the MAC layer protection mechanisms described above. Thus, generally speaking, 802.11b networks would have both more stable performance and QoS characteristics, independent of both network topology and data traffic, while 802.11g networks seem to be vulnerable when exposed to hidden node problem.

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