Measuring the reliability of 802.11 WiFi networks

Abstract

Abstract-Over half of the transmission time in WiFi networks is dedicated to ensuring that errors are corrected or detected. Despite these mechanisms, many studies have concluded that frame error rates vary. An increased understanding of why frames are lost is a pragmatic approach to improving real world 802.11 throughput. The potential beneficiaries of this research, include rate control algorithms, Modulation and Coding Schemes, simulation models, frame size selection and 802.11 configuration guidelines. This paper presents a measurement study of the factors which correlate with packet loss in 802.11 WiFi. Both passive and active approaches were used to investigate how the frame size, modulation and coding scheme and airtime effect the loss rate. Overall, packet errors were high. The size of frames were not a major determinant of the loss rate. The loss rate decreased as the airtime of transmissions reduced but at substantially lower rates than those suggested in simple packet error models. Future work will further try to isolate and investigate specific errors, such as head on collisions in the preamble.

Preparing Wi-Fi Networks for Novel Services in Smart Infrastructure

“…Packet loss can be caused by head-on collisions, hidden nodes, interference, rate control algorithms or airtime. For example, Murray et al [20] presented that possibility of information loss of frames that spend more time in the air because of low data rate is higher than those frames that transmitted at high data rates. in aditiion, clients connected at low data rates in the Wi-Fi network prone to higher packet loss and consequently higher retransmission rates so that they consume large airtime of the wireless medium.…”

Crowd data analytics as seen from WiFi

“…The high loss rate for WiFi is confirmed by other research [107] that tries to find better estimates for the packet loss rate given different physical layer configurations. Similarly, in their work [108], the authors state that over half of the transmission time for WiFi is used to correct errors. Even so, the authors argue that frame error rates vary.…”