[Rpm] [Make-wifi-fast] tack - reducing acks on wlans

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Sebastian Moeller <moeller0 at gmx.de> writes:

> Just reading the introduction:
> "It is well-studied that medium acquisition overhead in WLAN based on
> the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol [11] can severely
> hamper TCP throughput, and TCP’s many small ACKs are one reason [53,
> 69]. Basically, TCP sends an ACK for every one or two packets (i.e.,
> received-packet-driven) [7, 15]. ACKs share the same medium route with
> data packets, causing similar medium access overhead despite the much
> smaller size of the ACK- s [8, 31, 36, 50, 58]. Contentions and
> collisions, as well as the wasted wireless resources by ACKs, lead to
> significant throughput decline on the data path (see §3.2)."
>
> makes me wonder whether the proper solution would not be to exchange
> the WiFi MAC with something that is actually suited for existing
> traffic patterns....

Well, there are people who want to do that (replace the MAC); it's
called LTE-U: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum

I'd much rather keep the WiFi MAC, thankyouverymuch. It may suck (for
certain values of "suck"), but at least it doesn't impose a centralised
controller on you :)

-Toke