I want to know, on an average, how many wireless clients can be associated to a wireless access point at a time?
I doubt anyone can answer that question. We could answer questions like, "What's the theoretical maximum clients that can be assoc with a WAP?" The number of MAC addresses currently in circulation for WAPs might give you an idea, though totally unrealistic, but still an upper bound. Further, and perhaps more realistically, the 802.11 spec might put a min limit, and less likely a max limit, or at least some guidelines, on the number of clients a WAP must be able to support. As for practical aspects of this, typical max clients will be limited by the WAP's firmware settings and by the owner's settings. Like I have my WAP limited to support five clients. WAPs probably could in principle, and not unrealistically, support 100s of clients, but throughput and web browsing will be horrible. I'm guessing that public WAPs probably limit client associattions, through the owner's configuration setup, to somewhere between 25-50 clients to facilitate reasonable throughput for those who are connected. What is the "average" you ask. Sorry, can't answer that.
Actually I have doubt with the EAP field in the header.. Is it there to limit the number of active devices? Since its 8 bit, then it can have 256 devices associated at a time. But as u said, the throughout will be worst.
I'm confused what EAP has to do with the number of clients. As far as I know, EAP is a security protocol and is not related to identifying the client, but rather exists to enable the WAP to verify that the client has authorization to be associated with the WAP.
The number of clients associated to a WAP is dependent on two things:
1. The maximum number allowed by the designer.
2. The number set by the user.
Though a WAP device supports up to 20 clients at a time, a user might decide to specify a particular number of devices to be allowed either by a MAC address or IP address.
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