Rigorous and practical proportional-fair allocation for multi-rate Wi-Fi

Recent experimental studies confirm the prevalence of the widely known performance anomaly problem in current Wi-Fi networks, and report on the severe network utility degradation caused by this phenomenon. Although a large body of work addressed this issue, we attribute the refusal of prior solutions to their poor implementation feasibility with off-the-shelf hardware and their imprecise modelling of the 802.11 protocol. Their applicability is further challenged today by very high throughput enhancements (802.11n/ac) whereby link speeds can vary by two orders of magnitude. Unlike earlier approaches, in this paper we introduce the first rigorous analytical model of 802.11 stations' throughput and airtime in multi-rate settings, without sacrificing accuracy for tractability. We use the proportional-fair allocation criterion to formulate network utility maximisation as a convex optimisation problem for which we give a closed-form solution. We present a fully functional light-weight implementation of our scheme on commodity access points and evaluate this extensively via experiments in a real deployment, over a broad range of network conditions. Results demonstrate that our proposal achieves up to 100% utility gains, can double video streaming goodput and reduces TCP download by 8 × x.

[1]  Jinsung Lee,et al.  Making 802.11 DCF Near-Optimal: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation , 2016, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[2]  David Malone,et al.  Experimental assessment of 802.11 MAC layer channel estimators , 2007, IEEE Communications Letters.

[3]  Vasilios A. Siris,et al.  Optimal CWmin selection for achieving proportional fairness in multi-rate 802.11e WLANs: test-bed implementation and evaluation , 2006, WINTECH.

[4]  Nick McKeown,et al.  BeHop: a testbed for dense WiFi networks , 2014, WiNTECH '14.

[5]  Wei Cheng,et al.  Maximizing throughput when achieving time fairness in multi-rate wireless LANs , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[6]  Fred Daneshgaran,et al.  On the throughput performance of multirate IEEE 802.11 networks with variable-loaded stations: analysis, modeling, and a novel proportional fairness criterion , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[7]  Douglas J. Leith,et al.  Max-Weight Revisited: Sequences of Nonconvex Optimizations Solving Convex Optimizations , 2016, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[8]  Kin K. Leung,et al.  Utility-proportional fairness in wireless networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications - (PIMRC).

[9]  Sandip Chakraborty,et al.  Proportional fairness in MAC layer channel access of IEEE 802.11s EDCA based wireless mesh networks , 2013, Ad Hoc Networks.

[10]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Convex Optimization , 2004, Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook.

[11]  Injong Rhee,et al.  WiFox: scaling WiFi performance for large audience environments , 2012, CoNEXT '12.

[12]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Performance anomaly of 802.11b , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[13]  Yang Richard Yang,et al.  Proportional Fairness in Multi-Rate Wireless LANs , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[14]  A. M. Abdullah,et al.  Wireless lan medium access control (mac) and physical layer (phy) specifications , 1997 .

[15]  R. Faure,et al.  Introduction to operations research , 1968 .

[16]  Frederick S. Hillier,et al.  Introduction to Operations Research and Revised CD-ROM 8 , 2005 .

[17]  A. Girotra,et al.  Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802 . 11 Distributed Coordination Function , 2005 .

[18]  Ken R. Duffy,et al.  Log-convexity of rate region in 802.11e WLANs , 2010, IEEE Communications Letters.

[19]  Raj Jain,et al.  A Quantitative Measure Of Fairness And Discrimination For Resource Allocation In Shared Computer Systems , 1998, ArXiv.

[20]  P. Samundiswary,et al.  Performance Analysis of IEEE 802 , 2013 .

[21]  Frank Kelly,et al.  Charging and rate control for elastic traffic , 1997, Eur. Trans. Telecommun..

[22]  Anurag Kumar,et al.  Experiences With a Centralized Scheduling Approach for Performance Management of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs , 2013, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[23]  David Malone,et al.  Exploiting the capture effect to improve WLAN throughput , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM).

[24]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Fundamental Design Issues for the Future Internet (Invited Paper) , 1995, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[25]  Wei Cheng,et al.  A Time Fairness-Based MAC Algorithm for Throughput Maximization in 802.11 Networks , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[26]  Suman Banerjee,et al.  Observing home wireless experience through WiFi APs , 2013, MobiCom.

[27]  Nj Piscataway,et al.  Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications , 1996 .

[28]  Yan Grunenberger,et al.  Experience with an implementation of the Idle Sense wireless access method , 2007, CoNEXT '07.

[29]  Huw Oliver,et al.  Proportional fair throughput allocation in multirate IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs , 2007, Wirel. Networks.

[30]  Douglas J. Leith,et al.  Proportional Fairness in 802.11 Wireless LANs , 2011, IEEE Communications Letters.

[31]  Soung Chang Liew,et al.  Proportional fairness in wireless LANs and ad hoc networks , 2005, IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2005.

[32]  Andrzej Duda,et al.  Idle sense: an optimal access method for high throughput and fairness in rate diverse wireless LANs , 2005, SIGCOMM '05.

[33]  Upamanyu Madhow,et al.  Beyond Proportional Fairness: A Resource Biasing Framework for Shaping Throughput Profiles in Multihop Wireless Networks , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.