Seamless redundancy layered atop Wi-Fi has been shown able to tangibly
increase communication quality, hence offering industry-grade reliability.
However, it also implies much higher network traffic, which is often unbearable
as the wireless spectrum is a shared and scarce resource. To deal with this
drawback the Wi-Red proposal includes suitable duplication avoidance
mechanisms, which reduce spectrum consumption by preventing transmission on air
of inessential frame duplicates.
In this paper, the ability of such mechanisms to save wireless bandwidth is
experimentally evaluated. To this purpose, specific post-analysis techniques
have been defined, which permit to carry out such an assessment on a simple
testbed that relies on plain redundancy and do not require any changes to the
adapters' firmware. As results show, spectrum consumption decreases noticeably
without communication quality is impaired. Further saving can be obtained if a
slight worsening is tolerated for latencies.Comment: preprint, 13 page