Over the past two decades, Wi-Fi technology (defined by the IEEE 802.11 standard) has become a prominent wireless network access technology. In many situations, a device may attach to several Wi-Fi access points within the radio range. The operating system makes its choice over metrics that do not take into account the actual available capacity. To fill this gap, several proposals have been made to infer capacity, for example by estimating the occupied proportion of the channel. However, these techniques are being thwarted by the mechanisms recently introduced in 802.11 to improve transmission speeds, in particular frame aggregation. In this article, we focus on busy time inference based on frame aggregation level. We propose an analytical model based on a Markov chain which estimates the theoretical aggregation level for different amounts of cross traffic. We validate its accuracy against simulations carried out on the ns-3 network simulator and an ad-hoc simulator. Results show that the theoretical model gives an accurate estimation of the frame aggregation level and that it can be used to infer the network load.

No abstract

No abstract