Inproceedings,
A Measurement Study on 802.11 Concurrently Used
Proc. of the Third International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing (ISWPC 2008), page 610-615. (2008)
Abstract
Abstract—Not only the communication capabilities of 802.11,
but also the capability to determine the position of mobile devices
make 802.11 highly appealing for many application areas.
Typically, a mobile device that wants to know its position regularly
performs active or passive scans to obtain signal strength
measurements of neighboring access points. Active and passive
scanning are survey techniques originally intended to be performed
once in a while to learn about the presence and signal reception
quality of access points within communication range. However,
so far, no investigations are known to have been launched into
how regular scanning affects concurrent data transmissions from
an end-user point of view. In this paper, we explore how common
data communication is affected while actively or passively scanning
at the same time. We found that with an active scanning interval
of equal or greater than 2 seconds the network conditions such
as throughput and round trip delay are sufficient for interactive
network applications. The use of passive scanning is prohibitive
while simultaneously performing interactive data communication
due to communication dropouts of more than 1.3 seconds during
each scan.
