Fast wireless protocol: A network stack design for wireless transmission

Daniel M. Havey, Kevin C. Almeroth

Abstract: The robust and efficient streaming of video over wireless networks poses serious challenges. Inherent instabilities in the wireless medium lead to large, highly variable delay, throughput variations, and data loss. To cope with this problem the wireless MAC has incorporated many features such as reliability and aggregation. These features allow transport protocols such as TCP to work by hiding the frame losses from layers above the MAC. The problem is that in doing so they create overhead leading to loss of throughput. In this paper, we investigate a receiver side network stack design that allows these features to be switched off in the MAC. We instead provide reliability and aggregation features at the session layer. Our network stack design reduces the overhead cost significantly over MAC frame aggregation and increases throughput. We demonstrate the throughput advantages of our approach in testbed and emulation and analyze the effects of overhead created by our system.