Enhancing throughput over wireless LANs using channel state dependent packet scheduling

  • Authors:
  • Pravin Bhagwat;Partha Bhattacharya;Arvind Krishna;Satish K. Tripathit

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;Dept. of CS, University of Maryland, College Park

  • Venue:
  • INFOCOM'96 Proceedings of the Fifteenth annual joint conference of the IEEE computer and communications societies conference on The conference on computer communications - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

Unlike wired networks, packets transmitted on wireless channels are often subject to burst errors which cause back to back packet losses. Most wireless LAN link layer protocols recover from retransmitting lost segments. When the wireless channel is in a burst error state, most retransmission attempts fail, thereby causing poor utilization of the wireless channel Furthermore, in the event of multiple sessions sharing a wireless link, FIFO packet scheduling can cause the HOL blocking effect, resulting in unfair sharing of the bandwidth. This observation leads to a new class of packet dispatching methods which explicitly take wireless channel characteristics into consideration in making packet dispatching decisions. We compare a variety of channel state dependent packet (CSDP) scheduling methods with a view towards enhancing the performance of transport layer sessions. Our results indicate that by employing a CSDP scheduler at the wireless LAN device driver level, significant improvement in channel utilization can be achieved in typical wireless LAN configurations.