Journal of KIISE:Information Networking (한국정보과학회논문지:정보통신)

Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers (한국정보과학회)
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Physical Layer Diversity and its Effects on the Performance of WLANs

물리 계층의 다양성과 무선 랜의 성능에 미치는 영향

  • Published : 2005.12.01
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Abstract

Wide spread deployment of infrastructure WLANs has made Wi Fi an integral part of today's Internet access technology. Despite its crucial role in affecting end to end performance, past research has focused on MAC protocol enhancement, analysis and simulation based performance evaluation without sufficient consideration for modeling inaccuracies stemming from inter layer dependencies, including physical layer diversity, that significantly impact performance. We take a fresh look at IEEE 802.11 WLANs, and using experiment, simulation, and analysis demonstrate its surprisingly agile performance traits. Contention based MAC throughput degrades gracefully under congested conditions, enabled by physical layer channel diversity that reduces the effective level of MAC contention. In contrast, fairness and jitter significantly degrade at a critical offered load. This duality obviates the need for link layer flow control for throughput improvement but necessitates traffic control for fairness and QoS. We use experimentation and simulation in a complementary fashion, pointing out performance characteristics where they agree and differ.

오늘날 인프라 무선 랜은 많은 사용자들이 사용하는 중요한 인터넷 접속 기술이다. 지금까지 무선 랜에 관한 연구들은 물리 계층의 채널 다양성으로 인하여 발생하는 모델링 부정확성에 대해 충분히 고려하지 않고, MAC 프로토콜의 향상 및 분석 그리고 시뮬레이션을 통한 성능 평가에만 초점을 맞추어 왔다. 본 논문에서는 계층 상호 간의 의존성의 중요성에 주목하는 새로운 시각으로 IEEE 802.11 무선 랜의 특성을 고찰한다. 실제 무선 랜 시스템 상에서 실험을 수행하여 물리 계층에서 발생하는 불평등성을 관찰하였다. 그리고, 그것이 노드들 간의 혼잡 수준을 떨어뜨리는 역할을 하여 경쟁 기반의 MAC 처리율이 혼잡 상태에서도 서서히 감소하는 것을 보인다. 반면에 노드들 간의 공평성과 노드 처리율의 안정성은 시스템 입력 로드가 특정 수준을 넘으면 크게 저하되는 것을 보인다. 이와 같은 결과를 통하여, 처리율을 높이기 위해 링크 계층에서 제어를 할 필요성은 적은 반면에, 공평한 자원 분배나 서비스의 품질을 보장하기 위해서는 트래픽 제어가 필요하다는 것을 알 수 있다. 시스템의 성능 평가를 위하여 시뮬레이션과 실험을 병행하였다.

Keywords

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