Wireless Reliability: Rethinking 802.11 Packet Loss

Wireless enabled devices are ubiquitous in today's computing environment. Businesses, universities, and home users alike are taking advantage of the easy deployment of wireless devices to provide network connectivity without the expense associated with wired connections. Unfortunately, the wireless medium is inherently unreliable resulting in significant work having been performed to better understand the characteristics of the wireless environment. Notably, many works attribute the primary source of wireless losses to errors in the physical medium. In contrast, the work shows that the wireless device itself plays a significant role in 802.11 packet loss.