Experimental evaluation of FairWLAN

Abstract

Wireless access is one of the most convenient and popular ways available to access the Internet. However, due to the use of shared medium, when an user makes an intensive use of the medium while a different user conducts a more intermittent activity, the later will be severely hampered in its network usage. Modern Access Points (APs) try to deal with this problem by implementing basic Quality Of Service (QoS) mechanisms that strive to share available capacity equally among the connected stations. The fairness of such solutions is limited, as knowledge of previous interactions is not kept: e.g. an user who previously downloaded a large amount of data will be granted the same share of bandwidth as another user who has not downloaded a single byte. FairWLAN is a centralized QoS management system. It obtains performance and historical traffic statistics from each AP for each station associated. Such information is used to configure the QoS mechanisms in the upstream router. FairWLAN provides fair sharing of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) capacity over extended periods of time. In this paper we present an experimental validation and evaluation of FairWLAN using a large campus WLAN and a small testbed.