Huang, K.D. and Duffy, Ken R. and Malone, David (2012) H-RCA: 802.11 Collision-aware Rate Control. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 21 (4). pp. 1021-1034. ISSN 1063-6692

Preview

Download (885kB) | Preview

Abstract

Rate control methodologies that are currently available in 802.11 network cards seriously under-utilize network resources and, in addition, per-second throughputs suffer from high variability. In this article we introduce an algorithm, HRCA, that overcomes these shortcomings, giving substantially higher, and less variable, throughput. The approach solely uses information already available at the driver-level to function and can be implemented on 802.11e commodity hardware. H-RCA’s design objective is to minimize the average time each packet spends on the medium (including retries) in order to maximize total network throughput. It uses a development of a recently proposed estimation scheme to distinguish transmission failures due to collisions from those caused by channel noise. It employs an estimate of the packet loss ratio due to noise in assessing whether it is appropriate to change rate. We demonstrate experimentally that packet loss ratio is not necessarily a monotonic increasing function of rate; this is accounted for in H-RCA’s design. As H-RCA statistically separates noise losses from those caused by collisions, ns-2 simulations show that it is robust to changing environments. H-RCA does not require specific hardware support nor any change to the IEEE 802.11 protocol. This point is substantiated with results from an experimental implementation.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the postprint version of the published article, which is available at DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2012.2216891 Funded by SFI grant RFP-07-ENEF530 and the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under grant agreement n. 257263 (FLAVIA project).
Keywords:	Rate Control; Collision-aware; WLAN; IEEE 802.11; TXOP;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
Item ID:	6002
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2012.2216891
Depositing User:	Dr. David Malone
Date Deposited:	08 Apr 2015 15:48
Journal or Publication Title:	IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
Publisher:	IEEE
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
URI:	http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIss...
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads