Implementing Packet Aggregation in the Linux Kernel
Jonas Brolin, Peter Dely, Mikael Hedegren, Andreas Kassler · 2008
In multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMN) Voice over IP (VoIP) suffers from large overhead created by the IP/UDP/RTP/MAC header and time due to collisions. As a result the VoIP capacity of WMNs is small. As shown in [1] a 3 hop WMN at a data rate of 2Mbit/s can only support 3 concurrent VoIP calls. [1], [2] and [3] propose the use of packet aggregation in order to reduce the overhead and thus increase the capacity. The idea behind packet aggregation is to combine multiple small packets into a single larger one, reducing overhead and collision probability in multi-hop environment. This paper presents insights into an implementation of an aggregation scheme in the Linux Kernel and its experimental evaluation. Packet aggregation is typically implemented together