We consider the sizing of network buffers in IEEE 802.11-based networks. Wireless networks face a number of fundamental issues that do not arise in wired networks. We demonstrate that the use of fixed-size buffers in 802.11 networks inevitably leads to either undesirable channel underutilization or unnecessary high delays. We present two novel dynamic buffer-sizing algorithms that achieve high throughput while maintaining low delay across a wide range of network conditions. Experimental measurements demonstrate the utility of the proposed algorithms in a production WLAN and a lab test bed.
The foregoing work is in the context of wired links, and to our knowledge the question of buffer sizing for 802.11 wireless links has received almost no attention in the literature. Exceptions include @cite_12 @cite_21 @cite_26 . Sizing of buffers for voice traffic in WLANs is investigated in @cite_12 . The impact of fixed buffer sizes on TCP flows is studied in @cite_21 . In @cite_26 , TCP performance with a variety of AP buffer sizes and 802.11e parameter settings is investigated. In @cite_31 @cite_29 , initial investigations are reported related to the eBDP algorithm and the ALT algorithm of the A* algorithm. We substantially extend the previous work in this paper with theoretical analysis, experiment implementations in both testbed and a production WLAN, and additional NS simulations.
@cite_26 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_31 @cite_12
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There has been an explosive growth in the use of wireless LANs (WLANs) to support network applications ranging from web-browsing and file-sharing to voice calls. It is difficult to optimally configure WLAN components, such as access points (APs), to meet the quality-of-service requirements of the different applications, as well as ensuring flow-level fairness. Recent work has shown that the widely-deployed IEEE 802.11 MAC Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) is biased against downstream flows. The new IEEE 802.11e standard introduces QoS mechanisms, such as Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), that allow this unfairness to be addressed. So far, only limited work has been done to evaluate the impact of these MAC protocols on TCP-based applications. In this paper, through ns-2 simulations, we evaluate the impact of EDCA on TCP application traffic consisting of both long and short-lived TCP flows. We find that the performance of TCP applications is very dependent upon the settings of the EDCA parameters and buffer lengths at the AP. We also show that the performance of the admission control strategy employed depends on the buffer lengths at the AP and the traffic intensity. We consider the task of sizing buffers for TCP flows in 802.11e WLANs. A number of fundamental new issues arise compared to wired networks. These include that the mean service rate is dependent on the level of channel contention and packet inter-service times vary stochastically due to the random nature of CSMA CA operation. We find that these considerations lead naturally to a requirement for adaptation of buffer sizes in response to changing network conditions. Today, IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is a prevailing solution for the wireless Internet access while transport control protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in the Internet. It is known that, in the infrastructure WLAN with multiple long-lived TCP flow stations, the actual number of contending TCP stations is limited to a small number, and the aggregated TCP throughput is basically independent of the total number of TCP stations. It is due to the behavior of the TCP flow control in the infrastructure WLAN, where the downlink (i.e., access point-to-stations) is the bottleneck link. In this paper, we develop an accurate and realistic analytical model of long-lived TCP over WLAN based on a well-known p-persistent model of the 802.11. We calculate the average number of the active TCP stations as well as the aggregated TCP throughput using our model for a given number of TCP stations and the maximum TCP receive window size. We verify our model via ns-2 simulations. Moreover, we find from our work that the minimum contention window sizes of the standards (i.e., 31 and 15 for IEEE 802.11b and 802.11a, respectively) are not optimal in the sense of the TCP throughput maximization The network scenario is that of an infrastructure IEEE 802.11 WLAN with a single AP with which several stations (STAs) are associated. The AP has a finite size buffer for storing packets. In this scenario, we consider TCP-controlled upload and download file transfers between the STAs and a server on the wireline LAN (e.g., 100Mbps Ethernet) to which the AP is connected. In such a situation, it is well known that because of packet losses due to finite buffers at the AP, upload file transfers obtain larger throughputs than download transfers. We provide an analytical model for estimating the upload and download throughputs as a function of the buffer size at the AP. We provide models for the undelayed and delayed ACK cases for a TCP that performs loss recovery only by timeout, and also for TCP Reno. The models are validated in comparison with NS2 simulations. In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text.