NFS is a widely used remote file access protocol that has been tuned to
perform well on traditional LANs which exhibit low error rates. Users migrating
to mobile-hosts would like to continue to use NFS for remote file accesses.
However, low bandwidth and high error-rates degrade performance
on mobile-hosts using wireless links thus hindering the use of NFS. In this
paper, we present two mechanisms to improve NFS performance over wireless
links : an aggressive NFS client and link-level retransmissions. Our
experiments show that these mechanisms improve throughput by up to 200%,
which brings the performance to within 5% of that obtained in zero error
conditions.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-126
