Evaluation of the Performance of Spontaneously Deployed, Independent Networks

The growing demand for a wireless link is taking the deployment of wireless local area networks away from the notion of carefully planned and carefully managed setting, into a randomly deployed and independently managed (if at all) network setting. This results in highly contentious networks. In fact research shows that in most metropolitan cities, the size of contentious access points that are closely located with each other are overwhelmingly high. Subsequently, the performance of these networks is highly fluctuating and unpredictable. This paper aims to show how spontaneously deployed networks perform in the presence of fluctuating node densities. We perform an exhaustive simulation for different applications, including, VoIP, HTTP, and FTP. We focus on non-commercial deployments (private use at home or in an apartment).