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WiFox: scaling WiFi performance for large audience environments

Published: 10 December 2012 Publication History

Abstract

WiFi-based wireless LANs (WLANs) are widely used for Internet access. They were designed such that an Access Points (AP) serves few associated clients with symmetric uplink/downlink traffic patterns. Usage of WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. We study the various factors responsible for this performance degradation. We analyse and emulate a large conference network environment on our testbed with 45 nodes. We find that presence of asymmetry between the uplink/downlink traffic results in backlogged packets at WiFi Access Point's (AP's) transmission queue and subsequent packet losses. This traffic asymmetry results in maximum performance loss for such an environment along with degradation due to rate diversity, fairness and TCP behaviour. We propose our solution WiFox, which (1) adaptively prioritizes AP's channel access over competing STAs avoiding traffic asymmetry (2) provides a fairness framework alleviating the problem of performance loss due to rate-diversity/fairness and (3) avoids degradation due to TCP behaviour. We demonstrate that WiFox not only improves downlink goodput by 400-700 % but also reduces request's average response time by 30-40 %.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CoNEXT '12: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
    December 2012
    384 pages
    ISBN:9781450317757
    DOI:10.1145/2413176
    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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    Published: 10 December 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. goodput
    2. large audience environments
    3. traffic asymmetry
    4. wifi

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    • (2021)A Jamming-Resilient and Scalable Broadcasting Algorithm for Multiple Access Channel NetworksApplied Sciences10.3390/app1103115611:3(1156)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2021
    • (2020)Full Duplex RadiosProceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3422604.3425925(117-124)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2020
    • (2020)Adaptive Admission Control for IoT Applications in Home WiFi NetworksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2019.293571919:12(2731-2742)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2020
    • (2019)Use of Machine Learning to Detect Causes of Unnecessary Active Scanning in WiFi Networks2019 IEEE 20th International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM)10.1109/WoWMoM.2019.8793010(1-9)Online publication date: Jun-2019
    • (2019)H2NDN: Supporting Connected Vehicle Applications with Hierarchical Hyperbolic NDN2019 IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN)10.1109/LANMAN.2019.8846985(1-6)Online publication date: Jul-2019
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