Solving Ack inefficiencies in 802.11 networks

Murray, D., Koziniec, T. and Dixon, M.W. (2009) Solving Ack inefficiencies in 802.11 networks. In: IEEE International Conference on Internet Multimedia Services Architecture and Applications, IMSAA 2009, 9 - 11 December, Bangalore

Abstract

The founding idea behind this study was that 802.11 acks and TCP acks are substantial contributors to 802.11 overheads, yet, they both provide the same functionality; reliability. Initial experiments suggest that 802.11 acks contribute to over 20% of the overhead in 802.11 networks. Unfortunately, without 802.11 acks, paths with RTTs greater than a millisecond are unable to utilise this additional performance because lost packets, which occur frequently in unacknowledged (NoAck) 802.11, are interpreted as congestion. This study experiments with a range of PEPs (Performance Enhancing Proxies) which retransmit lost packets. A new proxy, known as D-Proxy, designed to solve the shortcomings of previous I-TCP and Snoop proxies, is experimentally developed and tested in Linux. D-Proxy is a distributed, proactive proxy that caches, analyses and resends packets based on TCP sequence numbers. The results suggest that D-Proxy can substantially improve 802.11 throughputs.

Publication Type:	Conference Paper
Murdoch Affiliation:	School of Information Technology
Publisher:	IEEE
Copyright:	©2009 IEEE
Notes:	Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This paper appears in: 2009 IEEE International Conference on Internet Multimedia Services Architecture and Applications, IMSAA 2009, art. no. 5439494.
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/1861

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