Performance enhancement of outdoor IEEE 802.11 cellular networks

Abstract

Most studies about the performance of IEEE 802.11 are limited to a single cell environment. Nevertheless, the idea of designing an outdoor cellular network based on WLAN IEEE 802.11 results very attractive, due to the several advantages that this technology presents: the low cost of the equipment, its operation in unlicensed spectrum and its higher data rates. If we compare the system performance in a cellular environment with its behavior in a single cell environment, we observe that its performance decreases considerably with the growth of the transmission data rate employed and due to co-channel interference. In this paper, we propose some enhancement mechanisms, in order to reduce the interference influence on network performance. Moreover, we study the viability of using sectorised antennas at the access points. We present its performance under different load conditions and compare this behavior with the results obtained in an isolated single cell environment, which has no interference.