skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: TACK: Improving Wireless Transport Performance by Taming Acknowledgments
The shared nature of the wireless medium induces contention between data transport and backward signaling, such as acknowledgement. The current way of TCP acknowledgment induces control overhead which is counter-productive for TCP performance especially in wireless local area network (WLAN) scenarios.In this paper, we present a new acknowledgement called TACK ("Tame ACK"), as well as its TCP implementation TCP-TACK. TCP-TACK works on top of commodity WLAN, delivering high wireless transport goodput with minimal control overhead in the form of ACKs, without any hardware modification. To minimize ACK frequency, TACK abandons the legacy received-packet-driven ACK. Instead, it balances byte-counting ACK and periodic ACK so as to achieve a controlled ACK frequency. Evaluation results show that TCP-TACK achieves significant advantages over legacy TCP in WLAN scenarios due to less contention between data packets and ACKs. Specifically, TCP-TACK reduces over 90% of ACKs and also obtains an improvement of ~ 28% on good-put. We further find it performs equally well as high-speed TCP variants in wide area network (WAN) scenarios, this is attributed to the advancements of the TACK-based protocol design in loss recovery, round-trip timing, and send rate control.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1909212 1763256
NSF-PAR ID:
10186617
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (SIGCOMM 2020)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
15-30
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking)
    null (Ed.)
    The shared nature of the wireless medium induces contention between data transport and backward signaling, such as acknowledgment. The current way of TCP acknowledgment induces control overhead which is counter-productive for TCP performance especially in wireless local area network (WLAN) scenarios. In this paper, we present a new acknowledgment called TACK (“Tame ACK”), as well as its TCP implementation TCP-TACK. TACK seeks to minimize ACK frequency, which is exactly what is required by transport. TCP-TACK works on top of commodity WLAN, delivering high wireless transport goodput with minimal control overhead in the form of ACKs, without any hardware modification. Evaluation results show that TCP-TACK achieves significant advantages over legacy TCP in WLAN scenarios due to less contention between data packets and ACKs. Specifically, TCP-TACK reduces over 90% of ACKs and also obtains an improvement of up to 28% on goodput. A TACK-based protocol is a good replacement of the legacy TCP to compensate for scenarios where the acknowledgment overhead is non-negligible. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials)
    Millimeter-wave (mmWave) with large spectrum available is considered as the most promising frequency band for future wireless communications. The IEEE 802.11ad and IEEE 802.11ay operating on 60 GHz mmWave are the two most expected wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies for ultra-high-speed communications. For the IEEE 802.11ay standard still under development, there are plenty of proposals from companies and researchers who are involved with the IEEE 802.11ay task group. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review on the medium access control layer (MAC) related issues for the IEEE 802.11ay, some cross-layer between physical layer (PHY) and MAC technologies are also included. We start with MAC related technologies in the IEEE 802.11ad and discuss design challenges on mmWave communications, leading to some MAC related technologies for the IEEE 802.11ay. We then elaborate on important design issues for IEEE 802.11ay. Specifically, we review the channel bonding and aggregation for the IEEE 802.11ay, and point out the major differences between the two technologies. Then, we describe channel access and channel allocation in the IEEE 802.11ay, including spatial sharing and interference mitigation technologies. After that, we present an in-depth survey on beamforming training (BFT), beam tracking, single-user multiple-input-multiple-output (SU-MIMO) beamforming and multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) beamforming. Finally, we discuss some open design issues and future research directions for mmWave WLANs. We hope that this paper provides a good introduction to this exciting research area for future wireless systems. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; ( , NSDI)
    Conventional thinking treats the wireless channel as a constraint, so wireless network designs to date target endpoint designs that best utilize the channel. Examples include rate and power control at the transmitter, sophisticated receiver decoder designs, and high-performance forward error correction for the data itself. We instead explore whether it is possible to reconfigure the environment itself to facilitate wireless communication. In this work, we instrument the environment with a large array of inexpensive antenna (LAIA) elements, and design algorithms to configure LAIA elements in real time. Our system achieves a high level of programmability through rapid adjustments of an on-board phase shifter in each LAIA element. We design a channel decomposition algorithm to quickly estimate the wireless channel due to the environment alone, which leads us to a process to align the phases of the LAIA elements. Variations of our core algorithm then improve wireless channels on the fly for singleand multi-antenna links, as well as nearby networks operating on adjacent frequency bands. We implement and deploy a 36-element LAIA array in a real indoor home environment. Experiments in this setting show that, by reconfiguring the wireless environment, we can achieve a 24% TCP throughput improvement on average and a median improvement of 51.4% in Shannon capacity over baseline single-antenna links. Over baseline multi-antenna links, LAIA achieves an improvement of 12.23% to 18.95% in Shannon capacity. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ( , Proceedings of the Workshop on ns-3)
    null (Ed.)
    To address the needs of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications in 5G and beyond era, the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band with very large spectrum availability have been recognized as a promising choice for future wireless communications. In particular, IEEE 802.11ad/ay operating on 60 GHz carrier frequency is a highly anticipated wireless local area network (WLAN) technology for supporting ultra-high-rate data transmissions. In this paper, we describe additions to the ns-3 802.11ad simulator that include 3D obstacle specifications, line-of-sight calculations, and a sparse cluster-based channel model, which allow researchers to study complex mmWave Wi-Fi network deployments under more realistic conditions. We also study the performance accuracy and simulation efficiency of the implemented statistical channel model as compared to a deterministic ray-tracing based channel model. Through extensive ns-3 simulations, the results show that the implemented channel model has the potential to achieve good accuracy in performance evaluation while improving simulation efficiency. We also provide a detailed parametric analysis on the statistical channel model, which yields insight on how to properly tune the model parameters to further improve performance accuracy. 
    more » « less
  5. ( , IFIP Performance '17)
    WebRTC has quickly become popular as a video conferenc- ing platform, partly due to the fact that many browsers support it. WebRTC utilizes the Google Congestion Con- trol (GCC) algorithm to provide congestion control for real- time communications over UDP. The performance during a WebRTC call may be in uenced by several factors, includ- ing the underlyingWebRTC implementation, the device and network characteristics, and the network topology. In this paper, we perform a thorough performance evaluation of WebRTC both in emulated synthetic network conditions as well as in real wired and wireless networks. Our evaluation shows that WebRTC streams have a slightly higher priority than TCP ows when competing with cross trac. In gen- eral, while in several of the considered scenarios WebRTC performed as expected, we observed important cases where there is room for improvement. These include the wireless domain and the newly added support for the video codecs VP9 and H.264 that does not perform as expected. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email