[Make-wifi-fast] I used to dream of a single wifi cpu, memory, and I/O

[Bob McMahon]

I think of it as a micro translational bridge, i.e. get 802.11 to 802.3 to
standard forwarding silicon (though some call it a "skinny" AP.) The "AP
split" is between managing MAC/frame things and MAC/PHY things. Try to
minimize the PHY knobs so the RRH can self-manage what's not been preset by
the installer. Remove the sw config stuff on the RRH too as it just adds
OPEX costs for limited benefit.

Others see it as "bluetooth p2p" model applied to WiFi,  but radio pairings
at low latency, low power and high throughputs - though this mental model
has some flaws too.

I think the EAP architecture is woefully broken. "Centralizing the
controllers" of distribution management isn't the same as *eliminating &
mitigating the need to manage complex distributed things.  *Linux computers
are complex, distributed things and don't belong in homes unless the home
is owned by a network and sys admin ;)

The closest models seem to be ECPRI used by 5G towers or the distributed
access architecture (DAA) of HFC.

FiWi will blow those out of the water by my judgment - though those are OSP
things and FiWi will start as an inside plant thing.  We just have to
figure out how to motivate humans as engineers & marketing experts to start
moving in this direction. It seems like a no brainer that consumers will
want to show off their "fiber" - inside plant, future proof, life support
capable, resilient to failures, & something that increases the property or
asset value of their primary investment. Maybe FTTH shouldn't be marketed
as "Fiber to the Home" but "Fiber through the Home" with no more wires for
comm anywhere?

Bob




On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 12:02 PM Aaron Wood <woody77 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jul 9, 2023 at 10:40 PM Bob McMahon via Make-wifi-fast <
> make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
>> I wonder if treating WiFi like a transceiver is the better approach,
>> separating "the computer abstraction" from the remote radio head.
>>
>> Then it's a RF Front End(s) / CMOS Radios / PHY(s) / 802.11 MAC(s)
>> (lower) / 802.3 PAM4 / 100G SERDES / 4 1x25G VCSELs. Pluggable like an SFP.
>>
>> The virtualized APs could support at least 10 and maybe 100s of these via
>> merchant switching silicon and could be kilometers away. The MACs lower
>> could be simplified to dual queue a la L4S. No need for 4 AC queues per
>> MAC. Might be able to throw away 802.11 retries too and let the upper
>> layers handle it.
>>
>
> Isn't this how the commercial APs that use a combined
> backhaul/control-plane operate?
>
> I've often wanted to use something like OpenVSwitch to combine all the
> layer-2 broadcast domains without actually making them a single broadcast
> domain (central ARP responder/router, multicast-to-singlecast conversion,
> mDNS routing instead of always using broadcasts, etc).  I know that we were
> looking at that with CeroWRT, early on, using routing between separate
> subnets, but that required a bunch of proxies that never seemed to really
> work as well as I wanted (or I wasn't very good at getting them set up
> correctly).  I think we're maybe in a better place for that now.
>
> Given that wifi stations must associate with APs, there's so much
> knowledgeable state that can be centrally (and distributedly) cached and
> then used to move a bunch of broadcast traffic to single-cast.  With the
> huge difference in encoding rates between broadcast and singlecast traffic,
> especially as the number of STAs increases, it seems like it would be very
> beneficial.
>
> And if you were in the 1:1 AP<->STA situation that has floated across this
> list a few times (I do find the micro-AP idea fascinating), then all
> "broadcast" traffic should hopefully become limited-transmit-power
> single-cast, with minimal use of spectrum (both in terms of time and
> physical space).
>
> One issue that I've seen with many APs in the same space, is that many
> client stations are very aggressive enumerators of the available APs, much
> to the detriment of the operation of the system.  I've seen clients DoS all
> the available spectrum with wildcard probe requests and their responses,
> which sound like exactly the sort problems seen with ARP in very dense
> server racks that the vswitch and central ARP server model was meant to
> solve:  have a single "best" response instead of flooding the network with
> responses (or requests, in the ARP case).
>
> May be a good time to simplify.
>>
>
> It seems like perhaps a little more hierarchy/coordination could result in
> more simple operation at scale.
>
>
>>
>> Bob
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 2:25 PM Dave Taht via Make-wifi-fast <
>> make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>>> preferably using some sort of async circuitry for minimum interference
>>> and power consumption. I figured, oh, 256MB would be more than enough
>>> for a 10Gbit router.
>>>
>>> Instead, we can now layer 64GB on die.
>>>
>>> https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/07/05/3d-stacked-dram-and-processor-cube/
>>>
>>> --
>>> Podcast:
>>> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058793910227111937/
>>> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Make-wifi-fast mailing list
>>> Make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/make-wifi-fast
>>
>>
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