[Make-wifi-fast] SmallNetBuilder article: Does OFDMA Really Work?

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Bob McMahon via Make-wifi-fast <make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net>
writes:

> In that analogy, latency and bloat, while correlated, aren't the same
> thing. I think by separating them one can better understand how a system
> will perform.  I suspect your tests with 120ms of latency are really
> measuring bloat.  Little's law is average queue depth = average effective
> arrival rate * average service time.  Bloat is mostly about excessive queue
> depths and latency mostly about excessive service times. Since they affect
> one another it's easy to conflate them.

I'd say this is a bit of an odd definition? In my view, "latency" is the
time it takes a packet to get from one place to another, and it can have
many sources, one of which is bloat. For a rather comprehensive survey
and categorisation of other sources, see [0].

As you say, bloat does tend to drown out other sources of latency, but
that is a bug as far as I'm concerned. Once you fix that, looking at all
the other sources becomes much easier. Optimising those other sources of
latency is worthwhile too, of course, it just doesn't help as much until
you also fix the bloat.

-Toke

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6967689