Abstract
Wireless tour guides are mobile applications running on a PDA that are very popular among cultural environments, such as museums and art exhibitions. The Human-Computer Interaction quality derived from the use of these guides heavily depends on the wireless network used to access the information of the artefacts in the cultural environment. This work presents a procedure to evaluate the Wi-Fi network performance used by a tour guide system. The procedure is applied to a real museum in Spain. The procedure is based on a set of observation and measurements performed in measurement points distributed across the cultural environment. It also presents how to analyse the coverage of the wireless network, the set of environmental factors that may degrade the performance of the network and the effectiveness of the access point selection algorithm used by the mobile device. As result of the evaluation, we have identified a set of weak points in the network development. However, they were not relevant enough to alter the actual network deployment.