Improving Performance in Dense Wireless Spaces by Controlling Bulk Traffic

Abstract

The growing number of wireless devices nowadays often results in congestion of wireless channels. In research, this topic is referred to as networking in dense wireless spaces. The literature on the topic shows that the biggest problem is the high number of concurrent sessions to a wireless access point. The obvious solution is to reduce the number of concurrent sessions. This paper proposes a simple method called Bulk-n-Pick which minimizes the number of prolonged concurrent sessions by separating bulk from sync traffic. Aiming at educational applications, under the proposed design, web applications would distribute the main bulk of content once at the beginning of a class and then rely on small messages for real time sync traffic during the class. For realistic performance analysis, this paper first performs real-life experiments with various counts of wireless devices, bulk sizes, and levels of sync intensity. Based on the experiments, this paper shows that the proposed Bulk-n-Pick method outperforms the traditional design even when only two concurrent bulk sessions are allowed. The experiment shows that up to 10 concurrent bulk sessions are feasible in practice. Based on these results, a method for online performance optimization is proposed and validated in a trace-based emulation.