Fast Resilient Jumbo frames in wireless LANs

Abstract

With the phenomenal growth of wireless networks and applications, it is increasingly important to deliver content efficiently and reliably over wireless links. However, wireless performance is still far from satisfactory due to limited wireless spectrum, inherent lossy wireless medium, and imperfect packet scheduling. While significant research has been done to improve wireless performance, much of the existing work focuses on individual design space. We take a holistic approach to optimizing wireless performance and resilience. We propose Fast Resilient Jumbo frames (FRJ), which exploit the synergy between three important design spaces: (i) frame size selection, (ii) partial packet recovery, and (iii) rate adaptation. While these design spaces are seemingly unrelated, we show that there are strong interactions between them and effectively leveraging these techniques can provide increased robustness and performance benefits in wireless LANs. FRJ uses jumbo frames to boost network throughput under good channel conditions and uses partial packet recovery to efficiently recover packet losses under bad channel conditions. FRJ also utilizes partial recovery aware rate adaptation to maximize throughput under partial recovery. Using real implementation and testbed experiments, we show that FRJ out-performs existing approaches in a wide range of scenarios.