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Summary: Measurement-based Characterization of 802.11 in a
Hotspot Setting
Maya Rodrig Charles Reis Ratul Mahajan David Wetherall John Zahorjan
University of Washington
rodrig,creis,ratul,djw,zahorjan @cs.washington.edu
Abstract We analyze wireless measurements taken during
the SIGCOMM 2004 conference to understand how well 802.11
operates in real deployments. We find that the overhead of 802.11 is
high, with only 40% of the transmission time spent in sending orig-
inal data. Most of the remaining time is consumed by retransmis-
sions due to packet losses that are caused by both contention and
transmission errors. Our analysis also shows that wireless nodes
adapt their transmission rates with an extremely high frequency.
We comment on the difficulties and opportunities of working with
wireless traces, rather than the wired traces of wireless activity that
are presently more common.
Categories and Subject Descriptors:
C.2.m [Computer-Communication Networks]: Miscellaneous
General Terms: Measurement
Keywords: Wireless networks, 802.11, measurement
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