[Bloat] Slightly denatured articles about NC State proposal to uncongest wireless

[David Collier-Brown <davec-b@rogers.com>]

I imagine everyone in the world has see either the secondary-source,
http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-gupta-wifi/

... or the tertiary source discussion linked to at slashdot.

From the description below, this seems to be orthogonal to bufferbloat,
and almost completely aimed at prioritizing the access point over its
clients...

Eventually we'll know more: "The paper, “WiFox: Scaling WiFi Performance
for Large Audience Environments,” will be presented at the ACM CoNEXT
2012 conference being held in Nice, France, Dec. 10-13.

Abstract: WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large
conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink
goodput and responsiveness. We study the various factors responsible for
this performance degradation. We analyse and emulate a large conference
network environment on our testbed with 45 nodes. We find that presence
of asymmetry between the uplink/downlink traffic results in backlogged
packets at WiFi Access Point’s (AP’s) transmission queue and subsequent
packet losses. This traffic asymmetry results in maximum performance
loss for such an environment along with degradation due to rate
diversity, fairness and TCP behavior. We propose our solution WiFox,
which (1) adaptively prioritizes AP’s channel access over competing STAs
avoiding traffic asymmetry (2) provides a fairness framework alleviating
the problem of performance loss due to rate-diversity/fairness and (3)
avoids degradation due to TCP behavior. We demonstrate that WiFox not
only improves downlink goodput by 400-700 % but also reduces request’s
average response time by 30-40 %."

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain
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