Measurement-based, practical techniques to improve 802.11ac performance

Abstract

Devices implementing newer wireless standards continue to displace older wireless technology. As 802.11ac access points (APs) are rapidly adopted in enterprise environments, new challenges arise. This paper first presents an overview of trends in enterprise wireless networks based on a large-scale measurement study, in which we collect data from an anonymous subset of millions of radio access points in hundreds of thousands of real-world deployments. Based on the observed data and our experience deploying wireless networks at scale, we then propose two techniques that we have implemented in Meraki APs to improve both overall network capacity and performance perceived by end users: (i) a dynamic channel assignment algorithm, TurboCA, that adjusts to frequent RF condition changes, and (ii) a novel approach, FastACK, that improves the end-to-end performance of TCP traversing high-throughput wireless links. Finally, we evaluate TurboCA with metrics taken from a variety of real-world networks and evaluate TCP performance of FastACK with extensive testbed experiments.