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Is there a limit to the number of stations that can connect in ad hoc fashion?
At what number of stations would performance suffer compared to having an AP present?
thanks,

Ad hoc network throughput will degrade dependent upon many things but a good estimate of the max number of associated ad hoc stations is around 15.

If this is for a bunch of gamers running high Frame Per Second demanding games, it won't be good enough to support more than 5 or 6 stations on a .11g network -- they'd much rather go wired through a 100mb Ethernet switch.

If it is for a very small office that just needs local connectivity, it shouldn't be a problem supporting 10 to 15 stations or more. The problem is, how do you get to the Internet in that scenario... through one shared station? That scenario would bog down the one station processing everyone else's Internet requests (i.e., acting as the router).

It's much easier and much more effective to just put in a SOHO-type wireless-enabled router, like a Linksys WRT54G.

Joel

Joel, thank you for your reply. I actually thought 2-3 stations was the maximum one could productively setup in an ad-hoc network. Now I know it can be more.

sacim

Hi Sacim of Milano:

Joel's answer is way more useful than the standard answer:

IEEE 802.11 Section 5.6 -- An Independent Basic Service Set (IBSS) may have an arbitrary number of members.

I hope this helps. Thanks. /criss