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On the performance characteristics of WLANs: revisited

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SIGMETRICS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems

Pages 97 - 108

https://doi.org/10.1145/1064212.1064225

Published: 06 June 2005 Publication History

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Abstract

Wide-spread deployment of infrastructure WLANs has made Wi-Fi an integral part of today's Internet access technology. Despite its crucial role in affecting end-to-end performance, past research has focused on MAC protocol enhancement, analysis and simulation-based performance evaluation without sufficient consideration for modeling inaccuracies stemming from inter-layer dependencies, including physical layer diversity, that significantly impact performance. We take a fresh look at IEEE 802.11 WLANs, and using a combination of experiment, simulation, and analysis demonstrate its surprisingly agile performance traits. Our main findings are two-fold. First, contention-based MAC throughput degrades gracefully under congested conditions, enabled by physical layer channel diversity that reduces the effective level of MAC contention. In contrast, fairness and jitter significantly degrade at a critical offered load. This duality obviates the need for link layer flow control for throughput improvement but necessitates traffic control for fairness and QoS. Second, TCP-over-WLAN achieves high throughput commensurate with that of wireline TCP under saturated conditions, challenging the widely held perception that TCP throughput fares poorly over WLANs when subject to heavy contention. We show that TCP-over-WLAN prowess is facilitated by the self-regulating actions of DCF and TCP congestion control that jointly drive the shared physical channel at an effective load of 2--3 wireless stations, even when the number of active stations is very large. Our results highlight subtle inter-layer dependencies including the mitigating influence of TCP-over-WLAN on dynamic rate shifting.

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Derakhshani MKhan YNguyen DParsaeefard SDalili Shoaei ALe-Ngoc T(2019)Self-Organizing TDMA: A Distributed Contention-Resolution MAC ProtocolIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29421147(144845-144860)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2942114
Bhargava VRaghava N(2018)Improve Collision in Highly Dense WiFi Environment2018 2nd IEEE International Conference on Power Electronics, Intelligent Control and Energy Systems (ICPEICES)10.1109/ICPEICES.2018.8897289(1-5)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPEICES.2018.8897289
Maity MRaman BVutukuru M(2017)TCP Download Performance in Dense WiFi ScenariosIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.254063216:1(213-227)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
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Index Terms

On the performance characteristics of WLANs: revisited
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Design
2. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks

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Reviews

Reviewer: Alexandru Petrescu

This paper brings good news. It challenges some established beliefs in the body of WiFi knowledge. It shows that, contrary to the current belief that the total performance of the 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) degrades with the increase of the number of stations, only the DCF throughput decreases; the fairness and jitter do not. The explaining factor of this behavior is the influence of physical layer diversity as a form of multi-user diversity. This statement is backed by simulation results that are no doubt correct. However, it is already an accepted fact that some DCF implementations have performance issues with radio frequency interference behavior; this is why the point coordination function (PCF) was designed. A second claim described in the paper counters the accepted thought that transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput through a local area network degrades significantly when the number of stations is raised above two or three. As evidence, simulated analysis data shows that TCP throughput is relatively flat for a set of stations ranging from two to 100 in size. This is explained by the use of a TCP stack implementation called NewReno, and by its capability to finely distinguish between congestion and wireless collision (another well-known wireless TCP problem lies in that difficult-to-make distinction). The body of the discussion is backed by a significant number of graphs output by ns-2 simulation and also by practical experimentation with laptops, personal digital assistants, and access points. In some cases, experimental data are confirmed and extrapolated by simulation data. In other cases, the simulation is verified by a small-scale experiment. In other cases, only the simulated data is considered. The authors should have acknowledged the fact that, in general, simulation data is not relevant for drawing strong conclusions-in wireless environments, only experimental data can serve as a strong basis for argumentation. Overall, the paper is well written. Even the novice reader is smoothly guided through complex 802.11 and TCP concepts. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SIGMETRICS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems

June 2005

428 pages

ISBN:1595930221

DOI:10.1145/1064212

General Chairs:
Derek Eager
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Carey Williamson
University of Calgary, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Sem Borst
Bell Labs, USA & CWI, The Netherlands
,
John C. S. Lui
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review Volume 33, Issue 1
Performance evaluation review
June 2005
417 pages
ISSN:0163-5999
DOI:10.1145/1071690
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 06 June 2005

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SIGMETRICS05: 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

June 6 - 10, 2005

Alberta, Banff, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 459 of 2,691 submissions, 17%

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Derakhshani MKhan YNguyen DParsaeefard SDalili Shoaei ALe-Ngoc T(2019)Self-Organizing TDMA: A Distributed Contention-Resolution MAC ProtocolIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29421147(144845-144860)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2942114
Bhargava VRaghava N(2018)Improve Collision in Highly Dense WiFi Environment2018 2nd IEEE International Conference on Power Electronics, Intelligent Control and Energy Systems (ICPEICES)10.1109/ICPEICES.2018.8897289(1-5)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPEICES.2018.8897289
Maity MRaman BVutukuru M(2017)TCP Download Performance in Dense WiFi ScenariosIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2016.254063216:1(213-227)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TMC.2016.2540632
Bankov DKhorov ELyakhov ASchelstraete S(2016)Beacons in dense Wi-Fi networks: How to befriend with neighbors in the 5G world?2016 IEEE 17th International Symposium on A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM.2016.7523579(1-6)Online publication date: Jun-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/WoWMoM.2016.7523579
Khan YDerakhshani MParsaeefard SLe-Ngoc T(2015)Self-Organizing TDMA MAC Protocol for Effective Capacity Improvement in IEEE 802.11 WLANs2015 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps)10.1109/GLOCOMW.2015.7414195(1-6)Online publication date: Dec-2015
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Maity MRaman BVutukuru M(2015)TCP download performance in dense WiFi scenarios2015 7th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS.2015.7098698(1-8)Online publication date: Jan-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS.2015.7098698
Yoshioka STanigawa YTode H(2015)Higher rate packet transmission scheduling for enhancing TCP performance by smoothing of queuing time in wireless LAN2015 12th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC.2015.7158012(418-424)Online publication date: Jan-2015
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Lu ZWang WWang CLu ZWang WWang C(2015)Modeling and Evaluation of Backoff Misbehaving Nodes in CSMA/CA NetworksModeling and Evaluating Denial of Service Attacks for Wireless and Mobile Applications10.1007/978-3-319-23288-1_1(1-33)Online publication date: 2015
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Welzl MGjessing SKhademi N(2014)Less-than-best-effort service for Community Wireless Networks: Challenges at three layers2014 11th Annual Conference on Wireless On-demand Network Systems and Services (WONS)10.1109/WONS.2014.6814737(148-153)Online publication date: Apr-2014
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