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Optimizing Wide-area Wireless Services
Multilayer Protocol
Benchmarking |
Wide-area
wireless data coverage is available today primarily through cellular
technologies. However, provisioning consistent
high-bandwidth data performance to users is a challenge
for any cellular provider. The combined effects of long range wireless
links and high user mobility in these environments manifest as
hindrances - high and variable path latencies, packet losses,
burstiness, and occasional link outages. In our work, we have
demonstrated approaches along different dimensions to mitigate some of
these problems. Through deployment and experimentation of our
techniques on commercial systems with real users, we proved that our
techniques often achieve a
factor of two or more improvements in
throughputs and latencies.
Our work is a detailed
evaluation of protocol bottlenecks in wide-area data services, focusing
on the web browsing application. In particular, we studied potential
optimizations applicable at different protocol layers - data link,
network, transport, session,
application - and found both positive and negative interactions
among these optimizations. Our major finding was that by employing some
specific optimizations at the session and application layers and
dynamically tuning their parameters, web browsing in wide-area wireless
environments can be improved by 50-100%. This was the first evaluation of cellular data
performance through measurements, and real deployment in multiple
commercial networks.
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