The last decade has witnessed rapid growth in the deployment of wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard. The IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) has become a dominant technology for the (indoor) broadband wireless networking. The popularity of IEEE 802.11 networks comes with its low cost, high data rate and seamless handoff. Along with its success, there have been demands to enhance the performance of the IEEE 802.11b. To meet such needs, the IEEE 802.11 Working Group (WG) has been developing new protocols to amend the existing protocols. In general, IEEE 802.11b networks operate on either PCF (Point co-ordination function) or DCF (Distributed co-ordination function) mode. This research work mainly focuses on DCF mode for IEEE 802.11b standard. Real time measurement of an existing network performance (throughput) was carried out. WLAN performance analysis was presented. The study was carried out to establish the influence of number of workstations and traffic distribution/patterns on IEEE802.11b QoS parameters. WLAN network model was developed and simulated using MATLAB Simulink environment. The result showed that the performance of IEEE 802.11b WLAN deteriorate as the traffic loading increases and that Gamma Traffic Distribution has the best performance in terms of throughput than the Exponential and Geometric Traffic Distributions. The Real time measurement of throughput result was used to validate our proposed Matlab model.
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