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

[Sebastian Moeller]

Hi Toke,


> On Oct 20, 2021, at 13:55, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at toke.dk> wrote:
> 
> 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

	And here I thought their idea was to simply grab the "free" Frequency band and use them for their paid services.... 

> 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 :)

	Well, if the price for a more effficient MAC is a central controller, I guess trying to patch up the symptoms of the current MAC is a much better strategy than I gave credit for.... ;)

Regards
	Sebastian


> 
> -Toke