Opportunistic use of client repeaters to improve performance of WLANs

Currently deployed IEEE 802.11 WLANs (Wi-Fi networks) share access point (AP) bandwidth on a per-packet basis. However, the various stations communicating with the AP often have different signal qualities, resulting in different transmission rates. This induces a phenomenon known as the rate anomaly problem, in which stations with lower signal quality transmit at lower rates and consume a significant majority of airtime, thereby dramatically reducing the throughput of stations transmitting at high rates. We propose a practical, deployable system, called SoftRepeater, in which stations cooperatively address the rate anomaly problem. Specifically, higher-rate Wi-Fi stations opportunistically transform themselves into repeaters for stations with low data-rates when transmitting to/from the AP. The key challenge is to determine when it is beneficial to enable the repeater functionality. In this paper, we propose an initiation protocol that ensures that repeater functionality is enabled on...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CONEXT
• Authors: Paramvir Bahl, Ranveer Chandra, Patrick P. C. Lee, Vishal Misra, Jitendra Padhye, Dan Rubenstein, Yan Yu
• Keywords: Computer Networks, CONEXT 2008, Ieee 802.11 Wlans, Rate Anomaly Problem, Repeater Functionality