Distributed network computing over wireless links

With the advances of wireless communication technology, using the wireless LAN as a platform to perform distributed network computing becomes feasible. We study the characteristics of end-to-end communication over wireless links. With the advantage of reduced bandwidth competition in each LAN segment separated by the wireless bridges, and with the overlap of wireless and wired communications, an analytical comparison showed that the group communications over wireless links can be more efficient than over a single segment wired LAN. We conducted experiments of running distributed applications and the results showed that with the support of threads, wireless network computing can achieve the same performance as the wired networks. Furthermore, the statistical results from our survey showed that the users cannot tell the difference between wireless and wired settings in terms of the data access speed.