Cross-Layer Analysis of Rate Adaptation, DCF and TCP in Multi-Rate WLANs

—Wireless Internet access is facilitated by IEEE 802.11 WLANs that, in addition to realizing a specific form of CSMA/CA—distributed coordination function (DCF)— implement a range of performance enhancement features such as multi-rate adaptation that induce cross-layer protocol coupling. Recent works in empirical WLAN performance evaluation have shown that cross-layer interactions can be subtle, sometimes leading to unexpected outcomes. Two such instances are: significant throughput degradation (a bell-shaped throughput curve) resulting from automatic rate fallback (ARF) having difficulty distinguishing collision from channel noise, and scalable TCP performance over DCF that is able to curtail effective multiple access contention in the presence of many contending stations. The latter also mitigates the negative performance effect of ARF. In this paper, we present station-centric Markov chain models of WLAN cross-layer performance aimed at capturing complex interactions between ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Jaehyuk Choi, Kihong Park, Chongkwon Kim
• Keywords: Communications, Empirical Wlan Performance, INFOCOM 2007, Performance, Station-centric Markov Chain