319 research outputs found
Improving the Performance of Wireless LANs
This book quantifies the key factors of WLAN performance and describes methods for improvement. It provides theoretical background and empirical results for the optimum planning and deployment of indoor WLAN systems, explaining the fundamentals while supplying guidelines for design, modeling, and performance evaluation. It discusses environmental effects on WLAN systems, protocol redesign for routing and MAC, and traffic distribution; examines emerging and future network technologies; and includes radio propagation and site measurements, simulations for various network design scenarios, numerous illustrations, practical examples, and learning aids
IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Security Performance Using Multiple Clients
IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks have gained popularity, providing users mobility and
flexibility in accessing information. Existing solutions for wireless LAN networks have been
exposed to security vulnerabilities. Previous study has evaluated the security performance of
IEEE 802.11 wireless networks using single server-client architecture. This research
investigated the effect of multiple security mechanisms on the performance of multi-client
congested and un-congested networks. The effect of different TCP and UDP packet sizes on
performance of secure networks was also studied. The results showed that WEP encryption
significantly degrades the performance of congested wireless networks. Network performance
degradation increased as the number of clients was increased under all security mechanisms
Rigorous and Practical Proportional-fair Allocation for Multi-rate Wi-Fi
Recent experimental studies confirm the prevalence of the widely known performance anomaly
problem in current Wi-Fi networks, and report on the severe network utility degradation caused by
this phenomenon. Although a large body of work addressed this issue, we attribute the refusal of
prior solutions to their poor implementation feasibility with off-the-shelf hardware and their impre-
cise modelling of the 802.11 protocol. Their applicability is further challenged today by very high
throughput enhancements (802.11n/ac) whereby link speeds can vary by two orders of magnitude.
Unlike earlier approaches, in this paper we introduce the first rigorous analytical model of 802.11
stationsâ throughput and airtime in multi-rate settings, without sacrificing accuracy for tractability.
We use the proportional-fair allocation criterion to formulate network utility maximisation as a con-
vex optimisation problem for which we give a closed-form solution. We present a fully functional
light-weight implementation of our scheme on commodity access points and evaluate this extensively
via experiments in a real deployment, over a broad range of network conditions. Results demonstrate
that our proposal achieves up to 100% utility gains, can double video streaming goodput and reduces
TCP download times by 8x
Improving Performance for CSMA/CA Based Wireless Networks
Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) based wireless networks are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. With the aim of supporting rich multimedia
applications such as high-definition television (HDTV, 20Mbps) and DVD (9.8Mbps), one of the technology trends is towards increasingly higher bandwidth. Some recent IEEE 802.11n proposals seek to provide PHY rates of up to 600 Mbps. In addition to increasing bandwidth, there is also strong interest in extending the coverage of CSMA/CA based wireless networks. One solution is to relay traffic via multiple intermediate stations if the sender and the receiver are far apart. The so called âmeshâ networks based on this relay-based approach, if properly designed, may feature both âhigh speedâ and âlarge coverageâ at the
same time. This thesis focusses on MAC layer performance enhancements in CSMA/CA based networks in this context.
Firstly, we observe that higher PHY rates do not necessarily translate into corresponding increases in MAC layer throughput due to the overhead of the CSMA/CA based MAC/PHY layers. To mitigate the overhead, we propose a novel MAC scheme whereby transported information is partially acknowledged and retransmitted. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations show that the proposed MAC approach can achieve high efficiency (low MAC
overhead) for a wide range of channel variations and realistic traffic types.
Secondly, we investigate the close interaction between the MAC layer and the buffer above it to improve performance for real world traffic such as TCP. Surprisingly, the issue
of buffer sizing in 802.11 wireless networks has received little attention in the literature yet it poses fundamentally new challenges compared to buffer sizing in wired networks. We propose a new adaptive buffer sizing approach for 802.11e WLANs that maintains a high
level of link utilisation, while minimising queueing delay.
Thirdly, we highlight that gross unfairness can exist between competing flows in multihop mesh networks even if we assume that orthogonal channels are used in neighbouring
hops. That is, even without inter-channel interference and hidden terminals, multi-hop mesh networks which aim to offer a both âhigh speedâ and âlarge coverageâ are not achieved. We propose the use of 802.11eâs TXOP mechanism to restore/enfore fairness. The proposed approach is implementable using off-the-shelf devices and fully decentralised (requires no message passing)
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