An Evaluation of Multimedia Data Downstream with PDA in an Infrastructure Network

A PDA is used mainly for downloading data from a stationary server such as a desktop PC in an infrastructure network based on wireless LAN. Thus, the overall performance depends heavily on the performance of such downloading with PDA. Unfortunately, for a PDA the time taken to receive data from a PC is longer than the time taken to send it by 53%. Thus, we measured and analyzed all possible factors that could cause the receiving time of a PDA to be delayed with a test bed system. There are crucial factors: the TCP window size, file access time of a PDA, and the inter-packet delay that affects the receiving time of a PDA. The window size of a PDA during the downstream is reduced dramatically to 686 bytes from 32,581 bytes. In addition, because flash memory is embedded into a PDA, writing data into the flash memory takes twice as long as reading the data from it. To alleviate these, we propose three distinct remedies: First, in order to keep the window size at a sender constant, both the size of a socket send buffer for a desktop PC and the size of a socket receive buffer for a PDA should be increased. Second, to shorten its internal file access time, the size of an application buffer implemented in an application should be doubled. Finally, the inter-packet delay of a PDA and a desktop PC at the application layer should be adjusted asymmetrically to lower the traffic bottleneck between these heterogeneous terminals.