[Bloat] The bigger picture: whats components are used together to fight bloat

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 16 May 2013, Michael Richardson wrote:

> Most phones talk USB serial to the radio.  Many even use "AT" command 
> set...  Most "rocket sticks" contain the same radio, but it speaks 
> USB-ethernet instead of USB-serial, or sometimes it's a completely 
> proprietary (Windows only) interface.

Yes. But you're still not talking directly to the radio interface, it's 
not a TDM connection. You're sending packet over serial to the baseband 
which then uses its own scheduler to send packets out on the radio.

> yes, I'm aware that there are multiple queues.  I have no idea at this
> point if we will get to speak at that layer, I suspect that we will get
> access to a single queue.

Correct, those 3GPP QoS features are controlled by the network operator, 
not the user. So you're firmly in FIFO-land.

Only way to improve the situation is to start talking to the USB dongle 
vendors and try to get them to implement some kind of knob where one can 
tune the depth of the queue.

Currently in 3G I know at least one vendor who in the downstream direction 
uses a 400 packet deep buffer, regardless of speed of the access or size 
of packets. I could imagine that most USB sticks use a similar approach.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se