CENTAUR: realizing the full potential of centralized wlans through a hybrid data path

摘要: Enterprise WLANs have made a dramatic shift towards centralized architectures in the recent past. The reasons for such a change have been ease of management and better design of various control and security functions. The data path of WLANs, however, continues to use the distributed, random-access model, as defined by the popular DCF mechanism of the 802.11 standard. While theoretical results indicate that a centrally scheduled data path can achieve higher efficiency than its distributed counterpart, the likely complexity of such a solution has inhibited practical consideration. In this paper, we take a fresh, implementation and deployment oriented, view in understanding data path choices in enterprise WLANs. We perform extensive measurements to characterize the impact of various design choices, like scheduling granularity on the performance of a centralized scheduler, and identify regions where such a …