Computers have traditionally communicated with each other through wired local area networks (LANs). However, with the increased demand for mobile computers such as laptops, personal digital assistants, and the like, wireless local area networks (WLANs) have developed as a way for computers to communicate with each other through transmissions over a wireless medium using radio signals, infrared signals, and the like.
In order to promote interoperability of WLANs with each other and with wired LANs, the IEEE 802.11 standard was developed as an international standard for WLANs. Generally, the IEEE 802.11 standard was designed to present users with the same interface as an IEEE 802 wired LAN, while allowing data to be transported over a wireless medium.
Although WLANs provide users with increased mobility over wired LANs, the quality of communications over a WLAN can vary for reasons that are not present in wired LANs. For example, everything in the environment can behave as a reflector or attenuator of a transmitted signal. As such, small changes in the position of a computer in a WLAN can affect the quality and strength of a signal sent by the computer and can affect the network throughput of signals sent over the WLAN.
The 802.11 wireless standard has been amended various times to improve upon the standard and provide better performance results. For instance, the 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n standards have been either implemented or introduced for implementation since the original 802.11 standard was implemented in 1997. As a specific example, the 802.11n standard has recently been introduced to improve network throughput over previous standards.
Anytime a new standard is introduced, the impact of various conditions on the networking standard is sought to be understood. Typically, the actual hardware implementing the networking standard can be utilized to understand the impact of various condition changes on the standard's performance statistics. However, for newly introduced standards, these physical hardware components do not yet exist. As such, a simulation tool to simulate the network standard and the impact of various conditions on the network standard would be a valuable tool.
Several 802.11 simulation tools (both research and commercial) have been developed. However, none of these existing 802.11 simulation tools allow for a physically deployed IEEE 802.11 WLAN network configuration to be imported into a simulation engine and use this configuration as an input to the creation of “virtual” nodes in the simulation engine.
In addition, the existing 802.11 simulation tools do not allow for the intelligent use of only those parameters of the IEEE 802.11 specification which affect throughput. Instead, the prior 802.11 simulation tools require the full scope of the IEEE 802.11 specification to be implemented in order to derive insight into various throughput metrics.
Finally, the existing 802.11 simulation tools do not allow for an end-user to observe and understand the real-time operation of an IEEE 802.11 network, which ordinarily operates at speeds too fast for a human to discern individual events and states. As such, a simulation tool that overcomes the above deficits of an 802.11 simulation tool would be beneficial.