[Bloat] sigcomm wifi

[David Lang]

On Sat, 23 Aug 2014, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 04:34:09PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
>>> Note that there's a lot more to this kind of solution than “not badly
>>> overbuffered”. In particular, you have automated systems for channel
>>> assignment, for biasing people onto 5 GHz (which has 10x the number of
>>> nonoverlapping channels) and for forcing people to be load-balanced between
>>> the different APs. All of this helps in high-density.
>> is there actually anything for this in the 802.11 protocol? or is
>> this just the controller noticing that this MAC address has shown up
>> on 5GHz in the past so it opts to not respond to requests to
>> associate with a 2.4GHz AP?
>
> The latter.
>
>> Social Enginnering works well for this without a need to technical
>> tricks (Scale-slow on 2.4, Scale on 5)
>
> Having two separate ESSIDs is a pain, though; it means that when you go into
> the outskirts of your coverage zones, you need to manually switch to 2.4.

that depends on how many APs you put in place. you really should be trying to 
cover the area with 5GHz, and since you have so many more channels available, 
you can afford to use more power on 5GHs and give each AP a bigger footprint.

>> Yep, if the rate of control traffic could be set to be faster it
>> would help a lot. When you transmit slower, it greatly magnifies the
>> chances of something else coming up on the air and clobbering you so
>> your lengthy broadcast is worthless.
>>
>> But I thought that Dave Taht had been experimenting with this in
>> cerowrt and found it didn't actually work well in the real world.
>
> I've tested this in the real world. It works really well. (It's also pretty
> much standard practice in high-density Wi-Fi, from what I've been told.)

Ok, then I'm back to "how can I do this on OpenWRT"? :-)

David Lang