A novel channel contention mechanism for improving wi-fi's reliability

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07874

by belter • 2 years ago

93 43 2 years ago

arxiv.org

mark254• 2 years ago

Sounds like Token Ring...

gonzo2• 2 years ago

A token ring like protocol was in an early proposal for what became 802.11

greatgib• 2 years ago

Regarding how commonly are used wifi and Bluetooth in our everyday life. I don't understand why we haven't more frequency bands available for it. It is more in the public interest than a lot of useless private initiatives like WiMAX that can easily get large frequency bands.

PhilipRoman• 2 years ago

6GHz is definitely a step in the right direction. Also filters out all the poor people with old devices so you can enjoy radio silence on your 320MHz channel ;)

vlovich1232• 2 years ago

Temporary solution until within 5-10 years everyone has upgraded their routers and devices to sit on 6ghz, 5ghz, and 2.4ghz.

the_mitsuhiko2• 2 years ago

I don't understand why we haven't more frequency bands available for it

Do we really need more frequency? At this point it does not seem like the challenge for Wifi quality is actually the available frequency spectrum. In fact, I have a lot of devices still in this household that cannot connect to more than 2.4GHz and that is not a question of available spectrum but that supporting all those frequency bands apparently is too costly for some chips on the market.

foota• 2 years ago

Perhaps if the bands were wider it would provide sufficient incentive for adoption, since there would be more channels available (and a wider band would presumably be easier than two separate bands that are further apart).

wongarsu• 2 years ago

In any moderately dense city environment, apartment complexes, or high traffic areas you can absolutely feel the effects of a lack of frequencies.

In American suburbia it might not matter much, but it's definitely an issue for the rest of us

Tarball10• 2 years ago

Thanks to DFS restrictions in the US, there are effectively only two 80 MHz channels that can reliably be used in the 5GHz band.

2.4GHz only has three non-overlapping 20MHz channels, and those can only do ~286 Mbps throughput in the best case when using 802.11ax.

The 6GHz band is finally allowing 14 non-overlapping 80 MHz channels and 7 160MHz channels, without any DFS restrictions (though some channels are lower-power/indoors only).

vkdelta• 2 years ago

WiMAX has been dead for more than a decade now. Pretty rest of the spectrum is allocated to licensees for cellular/LTE/5G and other military applications.

stefan_• 2 years ago

Keep this in mind when someone tells you again what a beautiful demonstration of capitalism the "spectrum auctions" are. Most bits move over spectrum no one paid for.

Avamander• 2 years ago

I think we could utilise the current bands much better than we currently do. As others have mentioned here there are a lot of devices violating the standards or not implementing the parts that would alleviate congestions/interference. I've personally seen plenty of devices that insist on 40MHz operation in an environment that can viably support only 20MHz.

Then there's also 802.11ah for unlicensed sub 1GHz networks and 802.11af for licensed networks. If implemented properly, could shift some usage to other bands (especially if those devices can't handle modern features or require excessive transmission power to be reachable).

Though giving everyone channel 13 and 14 would indeed be quite nice. It's clear that we can't get rid of 2.4GHz operation.

johnwalkr• 2 years ago

On the other hand it seems like a miracle that wifi works pretty seamlessly globally, and there are no countries where you have to pay to use a proprietary service instead.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

I worked in this field for a while, and had my own novel mechanism for solving a problem.

The major issue I had and I suspect this will have, is with devices that don't play by the rules. The unit economics mean the manufacturer is going to squeeze everything out, and if they can 'cheat' and claim higher numbers they will.

Back ten years ago the issue was devices ignoring CTS frames but this feels similar.

avidiax5• 2 years ago

When I worked on WiFi at Microsoft, we discovered that Apple was cheating. Apple was implemented a random backoff timer to have less range than the spec, which would mean that Apple devices win most contentions.

We decided not to copy this into Windows, since it would be a race to the bottom.

ajb• 2 years ago

Wow. Do you (or anyone) know if they still do it? Was there any pushback on them?

Salgat3• 2 years ago

What's the legality of devices intentionally violating wifi standards and causing potential issues with other devices? Is this something the FCC could act on?

seagullz• 2 years ago

If it got tested and verified, wasn't their WiFi Alliance certification supposed to be revoked?

orev• 2 years ago

Was it a small difference from the spec, like an off by one error might be, or was it an order of magnitude difference that might point to it being significant and intentional? (Of course dropped 0 could also be a bug). That’s a fairly important detail for a claim like this.

hoseja• 2 years ago

Why would you not race? Why be nice to Apple?

Accelerate.

A novel channel contention mechanism for improving wi-fi's reliability

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