Proxy-RED: an AQM scheme for wireless local area networks

Abstract

Wireless access points act as bridges between wired and wireless networks. Since the actually available bandwidth in wireless networks is much smaller than the bandwidth in wired networks, there is a disparity in channel capacity which makes the access point a significant network congestion point in the downstream direction. A current architectural trend in wireless local area networks (WLAN) is to move functionality from access points to a centralized gateway in order to reduce cost and improve features. We study the use of RED, a well known active queue management (AQM) scheme, and explicit congestion notification (ECN) to handle bandwidth disparity between the wired and the wireless interface of an access point Then, we propose the proxy-RED scheme, as a solution for reducing the AQM overhead from the access point. Simulations-based performance analysis indicates that the proposed proxy-RED scheme improves overall performance of the network. In particular, the proxy-RED scheme significantly reduces packet loss rate and improves goodput for a small buffer, and minimizes delay for a large buffer size.