Investigating Performance of Concurrent Virtual Wi-Fi Interfaces

Abstract

The Wi-Fi technology has been fast growing and available on a huge number of electronic devices. Moreover, due to the easiness in deployment a Wi-Fi user is normally in the coverage of several surrounding Wi-Fi access points (APs). The Wi-Fi virtualization, which abstracts a Wi-Fi interface to appear as several virtual ones to the user, is one of the most significant current approaches in improving the performance of Wi-Fi networking. The existence of multiple virtual interfaces enables many useful applications such as aggregating APs' backhaul bandwidth, sharing Internet connections, or increasing range of Wi-Fi networks, etc. In the previously mentioned applications, the authors generally show that a Wi-Fi client with several virtual interfaces has better performances than the one with a physical interface under the considered metrics (e.g., Throughput, mobility, etc.). However, they have not shown the investigation on the performance bounds of the virtual Wi-Fi links. Therefore, it is worthy to investigate those performance parameters. This work extensively evaluates a real virtual Wi-Fi based system to reveal the capacity of downlink, uplink of the virtual Wi-Fi interfaces.