A Lightweight Scheme for Rapid and Accurate WiFi Path Characterization
Lixing Song, Aaron Striegel · 2018
WiFi serves as one of the key mechanisms for wireless access for mobile devices whether at home, on travel, or during normal day-to- day activities. Unfortunately, the perceived high bandwidth and low cost of WiFi is often tempered with varying degrees of quality. Compounding this further, existing techniques for assessing network performance are often expensive in terms of time, bandwidth, and energy making them ill-suited for widespread, longitudinal deployment. In this paper, we propose Fast Mobile Network Characterization (FMNC) to address this shortcoming. FMNC uses sliced, structured, and reordered packet sequences along with an awareness of frame aggregation to rapidly characterize available bandwidth. FMNC does this within the context of a single HTTP GET, consuming less than 100 KB on the downlink with resolution of the path characteristics typically occurring in under 250 ms. We demonstrate the performance of FMNC through extensive lab experiments under a variety of configuration scenarios.