WiFox: Scaling WiFi Performance for Large Audience Environments
WiFi-based Wireless LANs (WLANs) are widely used for Internet access. They were designed such that an Access Points (AP) serves few associated clients with symmetric uplink/downlink traffic patterns. Usage of WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. The authors study the various factors responsible for this performance degradation. They analyze and emulate a large conference network environment on their testbed with 45 nodes. They find that presence of asymmetry between the uplink/downlink traffic results in backlogged packets at WiFi Access Point’s (AP’s) transmission queue and subsequent packet losses.