Performance benchmarking of wireless Web servers

The advent of mobile computers and wireless networks enables the deployment of wireless Web servers and clients ill short-lived ad hoc network environments, such as classroom area networks. The purpose of this paper is to benchmark the performance capabilities of wireless Web servers ill such all environment. Network traffic measurements are conducted oil an in-building IEEE 802.11 b wireless ad hoc network, using a wireless-enabled Apache Web server, several wireless clients, and a wireless network traffic analyzer. The experiments focus oil the HTTP transaction rate and end-to-end throughput achievable in such all ad hoc network environment, and the impacts of factors such its Web object size, number of clients, and persistent HTTP connections. The results show that the wireless network bottleneck manifests itself ill several ways: inefficient HTTP performance, client-side packet losses, server-side packet losses, network thrashing, and unfairness among Web clients. Persistent HTTP connections offer tip to 350% improvement in HTTP transaction rate and user-level throughput, while also improving fairness for mobile clients accessing content from it wireless Web server. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.