On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 3:12 AM, Eggert, Lars <lars@netapp.com> wrote:

On 2014-8-19, at 18:45, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
> I figured y'all would be bemused by the wifi performance in the sigcomm
> main conference room this morning...
>
> http://snapon.lab.bufferbloat.net/~d/sigcomm_tuesday.png

There is a reason we budgeted a 1G uplink for SIGCOMM Helsinki and made sure we had sufficient AP coverage...

And what kinds of AP's? All the 1G guarantees you is that your bottleneck is in the wifi hop, and they can suffer as badly as anything else (particularly consumer home routers).

The reason why 802.11 works ok at IETF and NANOG is that:

o) they use Cisco enterprise AP's, which are not badly over buffered. I don't have data on which enterprise AP's are overbuffered.

o) they do a good job of placing the AP's, given a lot of experience

o) they turn on RED in the router, which, since there is a lot of aggregated traffic, can actually help rather than hurt, and keep TCP decently policed.

o) they play some interesting diffserv marking tricks to prioritize some traffic, getting part of the effect the fq_codel gives you in its "new flow" behavior by manual configuration. Fq_codel does much better without having to mess around like this.

Would be nice if they (the folks who run the IETF network) wrote a BCP on the topic; I urged them some IETF's ago, but if others asked, it would help.

If you try to use consumer home routers running factory firmware and hack it yourself, you will likely lose no matter what you backhaul is (though you might do ok using current CeroWrt/OpenWrt if you know what you are doing.

-- Jim

Lars

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