Performance issues for wireless Web servers

This paper studies the performance of a wireless Web server in a short-lived ad hoc network environment. Experiments are conducted on an IEEE 802.11b WLAN, using a wireless-enabled Apache Web server several wireless clients, and a wireless network analyzer The experiments focus on the HTTP transaction rate and end-to-end throughput achievable in the WLAN, and the impacts of Web object size, number of clients, and persistent HTTP connections. The results show that the wireless network bottleneck leads to inefficient HTTP performance, client-side packet losses, server-side packet losses, and network thrashing. Persistent HTTP connections can improve the HITP transaction rate and user-level throughput by 350%.