WiFi can be the weakest link of round trip network latency in the wild

As mobile Internet is now indispensable in our daily lives, WiFi's latency performance has become critical to mobile applications' quality of experience. Unfortunately, WiFi hop latency in the wild remains largely unknown. In this paper, we first propose an effective approach to break down the round trip network latency. Then we provide the first systematic study on WiFi hop latency in the wild based on the latency and WiFi factors collected from 47 APs on T university campus for two months. We observe that WiFi hop can be the weakest link in the round trip network latency: more than 50% (10%) of TCP packets suffer from WiFi hop latency larger than 20ms (100ms), and WiFi hop latency occupies more than 60% in more than half of the round trip network latency. To help understand, troubleshoot, and optimize WiFi hop latency for WiFi APs in general, we train a decision tree model. Based on the model's output, we are able to reduce the median latency by 80% from 50ms to 10ms in one real case, and reduce the maximum latency from 250ms to 50ms in another real case.