Performance of mac80211 rate control mechanisms

Authors:
Wei Yin;Peizhao Hu;Jadwiga Indulska;Konstanty Bialkowski
Affiliations:
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia;National ICT Australia, Brisbane, Australia;The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia;The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Venue:
Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
Year:
2011

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Abstract

The 802.11 wireless networking standard has several transmission rates which can be adaptively selected by the MAC layer to cater for various channel conditions. Such dynamic adaptations can improve per-hop performance in wireless networks by enhancing the data throughput, reducing the channel usage time and decreasing the number of failed transmissions. This in turn has an impact on the quality of service (QoS) provided for communicating applications. The new mac80211 framework, which is now part of the Linux operating system, defines functionalities and interfaces that can be used by wireless network drivers to access physical-layer information which has impact on high-level protocols/algorithms. In this paper we present a comprehensive evaluation of the per-hop performance of two rate control mechanisms used by the mac80211 framework in Linux: Minstrel and PID. The evaluation results show that Minstrel outperforms PID. We discuss the PID's performance problems and propose an enhancement to PID to address them. The evaluation of the enhancement confirms substantial improvement of PID's performance in a range of conducted and over-the-air communication scenarios.