| Abstract: | In recent years, a variety of mobile computers equipped with wireless communication devices have become popular. These computers
use applications and protocols, originally developed for wired desktop hosts, to communicate over wireless channels. Unlike
wired networks, packets transmitted on wireless channels are often subject to burst errors which cause back to back packet
losses. In this paper we study the effect of burst packet errors and error recovery mechanisms employed in wireless MAC protocols
on the performance of transport protocols such as TCP. Most wireless LAN link layer protocols recover from packet losses by
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.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
