Malone, David and Qi, Hanghang and Botvich, Dmitri and Patras, Paul (2013) 802.11 Buffers: When Bigger Is Not Better? In: Wireless Access Flexibility: First International Workshop, WiFlex 2013, Kaliningrad, Russia, September 4-6, 2013. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (8072). Springer Verlag, pp. 37-48. ISBN 978-3-642-39804-9

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Abstract

While there have been considerable advances in the modelling of 802.11’s MAC layer in recent years, 802.11 with finite buffer space is considered difficult to analyse. In this paper, we study the impact of finite buffers’ effect on the 802.11 performance, in view of the requirements of interactive applications sensitive to delay and packet loss. Using both state-of-the art and simplified queueing models, we identify a surprising result. Specifically, we find that increased buffering throughout an 802.11 network will not only incur delay, but may actually increase the packet loss experienced by stations. By means of numerical analysis and simulations we show that this non-monotonic behaviour arises because of the contention-based nature of the medium access protocol, whose performance is closely related to the traffic load and the buffer size. Finally, we discuss on protocol and buffer tuning towards eliminating such undesirable effect.

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	The definitive version of this paper is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-39805-6_4 . The research leading to these results was partially funded by the European Community’s 7 th Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under grant no. 257263 (FLAVIA project) and Science Foundation Ireland under grant no. 07/SK/I1216a and 08/SRC/I1403.
Keywords:	802.11 Buffers; Modelling; queueing models; buffer tuning;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
Item ID:	6016
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39805-6_4
Depositing User:	Dr. David Malone
Date Deposited:	10 Apr 2015 14:54
Publisher:	Springer Verlag
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	European Community FLAVIA Project, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
URI:	http://link.springer.com
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

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