Throughput measurement and estimation model for concurrent communications of multiple raspberry pi access-points in wireless local-area network

Recently, Raspberry Pi has become popular around the world as an inexpensive, small, and powerful computing device. We have studied its use as the software access-point (AP) for the IEEE 802.11n wireless local-area network (WLAN), where the channel bonding (CB) can increase the throughput by bonding two channels into one. However, the built-in wireless network interface card (NIC) adapter fails to support the CB. Thus, we have configured the CB using external NIC adapters, and investigated the throughput performance and estimation model for only one link between a PC host and a Raspberry Pi AP. In this paper, we present the throughput measurement for concurrent communications of multiple links with up to three APs under different adapters and channels with 11 and 13 partially overlapping channels (POCs) at 2.4GHz. Besides, we extend the throughput estimation model by introducing the throughput drop factor to consider interferences between the links. This factor can be derived from the CB use and the assigned channels for the links. The effectiveness of the proposal is verified by comparing the estimated throughput with the measured one.