Friday, November 13, 2015

Uplink Airtime Fairness Control

Problem statement:
There is currently no direct way to control uplink airtime usage of wireless clients on a WLAN without actually implementing something on the client. This is not always possible because of multiple reasons:
Diversity in the operating systems and hardware of client devices.
Privacy issues
General aversion to install 3rd party control software.

Abstract of the idea:
In this case, we address the issue of limiting the airtime used the clients in the uplink direction by controlling the TCP window size in the uplink direction. We do this by doing a deep packet inspection of open TCP sessions for every client and then appropriately limiting the advertised TCP window based on bandwidth consumption by the clients.
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The present disclosure discloses a method and network device for enforcing uplink airtime fairness in wireless local area networks. The disclosed network device receives usage limits associated with transmissions from one or more client devices. The client devices transmit packets to the network device via one or more uplink wireless mediums. The disclosed network device further collects wireless medium usage times associated with the client devices, and calculates a size for transmission windows corresponding to the client devices based on the wireless medium usage times and the usage limits.

The transmission windows can be TCP advertisement windows whose size determines a rate of transmissions permitted over the wireless medium. Then, the disclosed network device sets the transmission window to the calculated size.

Citation information is here:
G. Bhanage, S. Ganu, P. Narasimhan, "System and Method for Enforcing Uplink Wireless Medium Usage in Wireless Networks", US Patent App. 13/563,630, 2014.


Bibtex:

@misc{bhanage2014system,

  title={System and Method for Enforcing Uplink Wireless Medium Usage in Wireless Networks},

  author={Bhanage, G.D. and Ganu, S. and Narasimhan, P.},
  url={http://www.google.com/patents/US20140036893},
  year={2014},
  month=feb # "~6",
  publisher={Google Patents},
  note={US Patent App. 13/563,630}
}