Performance evaluation of redundancy in wireless connection

In a distributed computing environment containing mobile computers and wireless networks it is expected that users change their locations frequently; users are concerned with the time taken to complete their activity and each user expects their own personal activity to be handled separately. In such an environment, new methods for designing applications must be considered to provide a level of network performance that deals with hundreds of users who add complex interactions with unforeseen results; this complexity may produce poor performance with no exact answer why. It is claimed that understanding network performance is an art rather than a science because in practice there is little underlying useful theory; so, experience with real world examples can be used instead to give a rule of thumb [A.S. Tanenbaum, 2003]. In this work we used OPNET to develop a new model suitable for university environment. Our model was then evaluated to measure the performance of the wireless local area network for such university environment. We tested our model against three types of applications (ftp, http, and database) in two sites and found that among a set of other parameters throughput and response time were highly affected by the number of users per application. OPNET simulation showed the impact of the type of applications and the number of users (first year students, second year students and instructors) does not degrade the overall performance while increasing system reliability.