A Conceptual Design Model for High Performance Hotspot Network Infrastructure (GRID WLAN).

Abstract

The emergence of wireless networking technologies for large enterprises, operators (service providers), small-medium organizations, has made hotspot solutions for metropolitan area networks (MAN), last mile wireless connectivity, mobile broadband solutions, IP-based cellular phones (VOIP) and other event-based wireless solutions in very high demand. Wireless radio gateways (routers and access points) with its widespread deployment has made Wi-Fi an integral part of today's hotspot access technology in organizational models. Despite its role in affecting performance for mobility market segments, previous research has focused on media access control (MAC) protocol techniques , carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), fair scheduling, and other traffic improvement methodologies without detailed consideration for virtual switch partitioning for load balancing, reliable fragmentation capacities, buffer size dependencies, load effects, queuing disciplines as well as hotspot access control framework. This paper proposes a conceptual high performance hotspot solution (GRID WLAN) and through simulations with OPNET modeler, presents efficient performance metrics for its deployment. Considering the GRID WLAN access points in context, the results shows that with the design model, a careful selection of buffer sizes, fragmentation threshold, network management framework with network load intensity will guarantee an efficient hotspot solution.