Interarrival Histograms : A Method for Measuring Transmission Delays in 802.11 WLANs
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Traditional measurement tools are not suitable for fine-grain performance evaluation of 802.11 wireless networks. To improve this situation, we have developed Interar-rival Histograms, a method for measuring transmission delays based on gathering statistics of interarrival inter-vals at a receiving station. By measuring a sufficient number of interarrival interval samples with a clock res-olution of 1 µs, the precision of estimating the mean transmission delay is well under one microsecond. Un-like other proposals, it does not require expensive custom-made cards, because it uses commercially available equip-ment. It allows flexible measurements not only of wire-less cards, but also of access points, which cannot be done with other proposed methods, unless one can instru-ment the access point kernel. In this paper, we describe the principles of the proposed method, derive the estim-ation error of measurements, and experimentally demon-strate its precision by applying it to the 100 Mb/s Ether-net. To illustrate the cases in which the method can help analyzing the complex behavior of 802.11 networks, we present measurements of several commercially available access points and wireless cards to show some anomalies and differences with the standard. 1.
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2743524906