Link Layer Adaptation for Shared Wireless Links

Abstract

While traditional link layer protocols assume that they fully control the underlying link, in contemporary wireless networks the link may be dynamically shared by sessions belonging to different users and/or applications. To assess the impact of link sharing, we measure the File Transfer and Web Browsing throughput achieved over a Selective Repeat (SR) protocol, with or without contention from Media Distribution. Our results indicate that the optimal protocol settings strongly depend on the level of contention for the link. We therefore present two link layer protocols that adapt to the available bandwidth, our Adaptive Selective Repeat (ASR) protocol which dynamically modifies its retransmission timeouts, and the Radio Link Control (RLC) protocol specified for use by Universal Mobile Telecommunications System networks which does not employ retransmission timers. We first repeat our performance measurements to determine the optimal settings for each protocol, and then compare the fine tuned versions of all protocols with respect to their File Transfer and Web Browsing throughput, as well as to the delay induced to the contending Media Distribution packets. Our results indicate that while both RLC and ASR are more stable than SR, the complex RLC does not match the performance of our simpler ASR.