Abstract

The ever developing wireless LAN standardization and research activities worldwide along with the recent successful deployment of WLAN in numerous hotspots makes it clear that WLAN technology will play a key rule in providing broadband data coverage and as a complement for the existing cellular networks. Keeping this in mind, a lot of work has been done to address WLAN/WAN integration, development of mobile IP, hand off mechanism between WLAN and other wireless networks. However, another important issue, large scale deployment of WLAN has got less attention. In this thesis, we have developed two networks models of multi-cluster wireless LANs. One is infrastructure based standard multi-cluster WLAN and another is multi-cluster WLAN with gratuitous capability. We have also devised a MAC layer implementation which can be efficiently employed on both standard and gratuitous multi-cluster WLAN. We have developed a generic simulation software using C++ to simulate the performances of these networks. Our simulation results show that our network models along with the MAC layer implementation can be an effective solution to solve large-scale WLAN deployment issues.