Analyzing Wireless Networks
Mary Baker
Stanford University
In recent years, the number and variety of wireless network installations has
dramatically increased, from small-scale installations spanning buildings and
campuses to much larger-scale installations spanning cities and metropolitan
areas. Given this growth, it is crucial to analyze real wireless networks to
understand better how users take advantage of them. These analyses are
important for at least two reasons. First, they are helpful for creating more
realistic models of users when simulating new services, which is a common
technique in the mobile networking community. Second, they are also helpful in
focusing research on topics that will impact users the most.
This talk analyzes two very different wireless networks: the Metricom
Ricochet packet radio network, a high latency, low bandwidth,
metropolitan-area wireless network, and the WaveLAN network installed in the
Gates Computer Science Building, a low latency, high bandwidth, local-area
network. While the results from these analyses are necessarily valid only
for the particular networks and user communities studied, we believe many of the
conclusions will hold for similiar network environments, and the analyses
also provide a blueprint for others desiring to perform similar investigations.