Self-management in chaotic wireless deployments

ABSTRACT

Over the past few years, wireless networking technologies have made vast forays into our daily lives. Today, one can find 802.11 hardware and other personal wireless technology employed at homes, shopping malls, coffee shops and airports. Present-day wireless network deployments bear two important properties: they are unplanned, with most access points (APs) deployed by users in a spontaneous manner, resulting in highly variable AP densities; and they are unmanaged, since manually configuring and managing a wireless network is very complicated. We refer to such wireless deployments as being chaotic.In this paper, we present a study of the impact of interference in chaotic 802.11 deployments on end-client performance. First, using large-scale measurement data from several cities, we show that it is not uncommon to have tens of APs deployed in close proximity of each other. Moreover, most APs are not configured to minimize interference with their neighbors. We then perform trace-driven simulations to show that the performance of end-clients could suffer significantly in chaotic deployments. We argue that end-client experience could be significantly improved by making chaotic wireless networks self-managing. We design and evaluate automated power control and rate adaptation algorithms to minimize interference among neighboring APs, while ensuring robust end-client performance.

REFERENCES

• 1: AccessOne/Network OWS. http://www.strixsystems.com/products/products_main.asp.
• 2: Alcatel AirView Software. http://www.alcatel.com.
• 3: Autocell. http://www.propagatenetworks.com/product/.
• 4: IEEE OUI and Companyid assignments. http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt.
• 5: Intego WI-Fi Locator. http://www.intego.com/wiFiLocator/.
• 6: WI-FI Hotspot locator. http://jiwire.com.
• 7: Wi-Fi-Zones.com - Find more hotspot locations. http://www.wi-fi-zones.com.
• 8: WiFiMaps.com - Wardriving Maps and Hotspot Locator. http://www.wifimaps.com.
• 9: Daniel Aguayo , John Bicket , Sanjit Biswas , Glenn Judd , Robert Morris, Link-level measurements from an 802.11b mesh network, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 30-September 03, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 10: Aditya Akella , Srinivasan Seshan , Richard Karp , Scott Shenker , Christos Papadimitriou, Selfish behavior and stability of the internet:: a game-theoretic analysis of TCP, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 19-23, 2002, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 11: Yu-Chung Cheng , Yatin Chawathe , Anthony LaMarca , John Krumm, Accuracy characterization for metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi localization, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-08, 2005, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.1145/1067170.1067195]
• 12: D.-M. Chiu , R. Jain, Analysis of the increase and decrease algorithms for congestion avoidance in computer networks, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, v.17 n.1, p.1-14, June 10, 1989 [doi>10.1016/0169-7552(89)90019-6]
• 13: David D. Clark , Craig Partridge , J. Christopher Ramming , John T. Wroclawski, A knowledge plane for the internet, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 25-29, 2003, Karlsruhe, Germany [doi>10.1145/863955.863957]
• 14: Datacomm Research. New Datacomm Research Report: Wireless LAN Equipment Shipments to Triple Within Five Years. http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/Feb/1120138.htm, 2005.
• 15: Richard Draves , Jitendra Padhye , Brian Zill, Comparison of routing metrics for static multi-hop wireless networks, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 30-September 03, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA
• 16: R. Droms. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Technical report, Internet Engineering Task Force, March 1997. RFC 2131.
• 17: Global Mobile Information Systems Simulation Library. http://pcl.cs.ucla.edu/projects/glomosim/.
• 18: A. Hills. Large-Scale Wireless LAN Design. IEEE Communications, 39(11):98--104, November 2001.
• 19: Gavin Holland , Nitin Vaidya , Paramvir Bahl, A rate-adaptive MAC protocol for multi-Hop wireless networks, Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.236-251, July 2001, Rome, Italy [doi>10.1145/381677.381700]
• 20: Gavin Holland , Nitin Vaidya , Paramvir Bahl, A rate-adaptive MAC protocol for multi-Hop wireless networks, Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.236-251, July 2001, Rome, Italy [doi>10.1145/381677.381700]
• 21: Instat/MDR. 3Q 2004 WLAN Market Share Report. http://www.instat.com/r/nrep/2004/IN0401429WL.htm.
• 22: Intel Research Seattle. Place Lab: A Privacy-Observant Location System. http://placelab.org/, 2004.
• 23: G. Judd and P. Steenkiste. Using Emulation to Understand and Improve Wireless Networks and Applications. In Proceedings of NSDI 2005, Boston, MA, May 2005.
• 24: V. Kawadia and P. R. Kumar. Principles and Protocols for Power Control in Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2005.
• 25: R. R. Kompella and A. C. Snoeren. SPARTA: Scheduled Power and Rate Adaptation. In ACM SenSys 2003.
• 26: Bruce A. Mah, An Empirical Model of HTTP Network Traffic, Proceedings of the INFOCOM '97. Sixteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Driving the Information Revolution, p.592, April 09-11, 1997
• 27: J. Malinen. Host AP Driver. http://hostap.epitest.fi/.
• 28: Daji Qiao , Sunghyun Choi , Amit Jain , Kang G. Shin, MiSer: an optimal low-energy transmission strategy for IEEE 802.11a/h, Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 14-19, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/938985.939003]
• 29: Ananth Rao , Ion Stoica, An overlay MAC layer for 802.11 networks, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-08, 2005, Seattle, Washington [doi>10.1145/1067170.1067185]
• 30: Theodore S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 1996
• 31: J. Rexford, A. Greenberg, G. Hjalmtysson, D. M. A. Myers, G. Xie, J. Zhan, and H. Zhang. Network-wide Decision Making: Toward A Wafer-Thin Control Plane. In HotNets-III, San Diego, CA, November 2004.
• 32: B. Sadeghi , V. Kanodia , A. Sabharwal , E. Knightly, Opportunistic media sccess for multirate ad hoc networks, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570650]
• 33: A. Santhanam and R. Cruz. Optimal Routing, Link Scheduling and Power Control in Multi-hop Wireless Networks. In Infocom '03. IEEE, March 2003.
• 34: S. Thomson and T. Narten. IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration. Technical report, Internet Engineering Task Force, December 1998. RFC 2462.
• 35: V. van der Vegt. Auto Rate Fallback. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vdvegt/docs/gron/node24.html.
• 36: IETF Zero Configuration Networking (zeroconf) Working Group. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/zeroconf-charter.html, 2000.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
access points, channel assignment, interference, power control