Leveraging Frame Aggregation for Estimating WiFi Available Bandwidth

WiFi has emerged as a pivotal technology for mobile devices offering the potential for exceptional connectivity speeds. Unfortunately, the performance of WiFi may vary significantly making WiFi link characterization (and more broadly the path characterization) an essential element of the user Quality of Experience (QoE). The key challenge that emerges with respect to link characterization is how to characterize performance in an efficient manner. In this paper, we explore how the existing frame aggregation mechanisms introduced by 802.11e can be leveraged to achieve such a goal. We show not only how frame aggregation breaks existing lightweight mechanisms for link characterization but also how to carefully construct packet sequences that induce frame aggregation to capture the WiFi available bandwidth. We construct a proof of concept system, AIWC (Aggregation Intensity based Wifi Characterization), to demonstrate the aforementioned concepts with significant improvements versus prior work.

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