Squeezing the Gap: An Empirical Study on DHCP Performance in a Large-scale Wireless Network

Abstract

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is widely used to dynamically assign IP addresses. However, due to little knowledge on the behavior and performance of DHCP, it is challenging to configure a proper lease time in complicated wireless network. In this paper, we conduct the largest known measurement on the behavior and performance of DHCP based on the wireless network of T University (TWLAN). TWLAN has more than 59,000 users, 10,000 wireless access points and 130,000 IP addresses. We find the performance of DHCP is far from satisfactory: (1) The non-authenticated devices lead to a waste of 25% of IP addresses at the rush hour. (2) A device does not generate traffic for 67 % of the lease time on average. Meanwhile, we find devices of different locations and operating systems show diverse online patterns. A unified lease time setting could result in an inefficient utilization of addresses. To address the problems, taking account of authentication information and device online patterns, we propose a new leasing strategy. The results show it reduces the number of assigned addresses by 24 % and reduces the time during which an IP address is occupied by 17 % without sianificantly Increasing the DHCP server load.