BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT IN SHARED WLAN Abolfazl Nazari, Naser Yazdani, Naser Rezaee

ECE Department, University of Tehran, Iran

ABSTRACT

In order to reduce cost and administration task, it is desirable for operators to share their WLAN infrastructure [1]. In this paper, we focus on bandwidth management in shared WLANs. We propose an algorithm to allocate cell bandwidth to different operators in such a way that the traffic from one logical network can not affect throughput of the users from other ones. Due to its simplicity, this algorithm can be implemented in large WLANs that use Wi-Fi switches for ease of deployment and management of the network. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method by simulating the transmission of FTP and HTTP traffics. The results show that this method has an acceptable performance.

802.11 standard MAC procedures, which has been widely implemented in WLAN devices. Secondly, because of its simplicity, this architecture is scaleable and can be used in large WLANs that use Wi-Fi switches to simplify network design and management. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the related works. We propose our method in section 3. In section 4 we investigate the performance of our architecture through simulation results. Finally we conclude in section 5.
2. RELATED WORKS

1. INTRODUCTION

The success story of hotspots has convinced 3G operators to join other players in the hotspot deployment field, like Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP) and traditional network operators. As a cost effective approach, different operators can share a single physical network and build their own logical WLAN on it. In this way, due to having only one physical network to be implemented and managed, deployment cost and administration tasks will be reduced. Despite opportunities, there are some challenges. When multiple operators use one WLAN as their access network, radio resource management becomes more complicated. When there are different types of users and admission decisions are made in different networks, guaranteeing certain amount of bandwidth for users becomes more challenging. It is necessary to divide WLAN bandwidth among different operators, so that traffic from one logical network will have minimum effects on the throughput of the users from other logical networks. This strategy enables admission control entities in different networks to work independently and according to their resources decide if the new user can be
In this paper, we focus on bandwidth management in shared WLANs and propose an algorithm to allocate bandwidth to different operators. This architecture has two advantages. Firstly, it does not change the IEEE

accepted.

Since in conventional wired networks, usually WAN link is the bottleneck and LAN side has enough bandwidth, a lot of fair queuing algorithms have been devised to manage the bandwidth of WAN link. However, in WLAN, the network bottleneck may shift to LAN side. In shared WLAN this surely can happen, because WLAN cells have limited capacity which is shared by many subscribers of different operators. Few works on bandwidth allocation to different logical networks can be found. But in recent years for bandwidth allocation to individual users, many schemes have been proposed. Some of these schemes modify MAC layer [2] and some of them exploit queuing algorithm and manage AP polling list [3]. Because of the widespread implementation of 802.11 standard in WLAN devices, methods of the second category are more practical. In [4] authors adapt conventional Deficit Round Robin (DRR) to WLAN conditions. The method which is called cooperative DRR (Co-DRR) is capable of allocating upload and download bandwidth to stations. Our method is different of [4] in some ways. First, since we are only interested in total amount of bandwidth that a logical network can consume, we do not use AP polling list to allocate upload and download bandwidth separately. Therefore our algorithm can be deployed In Wi-Fi switched that do not have access to polling lists. Besides, our algorithm use transmission time of the frames, taking into account frame overhead, which is considerable in WLAN.
3. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE

1-4244-0463-0/06/$20.00 2006 IEEE

The purpose of our method is to allocate a pre-defined percentage of the cell bandwidth to each logical network. So that when the cell becomes congested, traffic from one logical network is not allowed to exceed its quota of bandwidth. In shared WLAN, each AP broadcast several Service Set Identifiers (SSID) which are the names of logical networks. Users according to their selected SSID are put in different VLANs. Figure 1 shows the structure of the cell bandwidth manager. Upload frames are transferred directed, but download frame, according to their VLAN tags, are buffered in separated queues. A fair queuing algorithm adapted from original Deficit Round Robin (DRR) [5] is used to serve the queues. A Deficit Counter (DC) is assigned to each queue and in the beginning of each Contention Period (CP) is incremented by a specific service share or Quantum (Q). During CP, stations send their upload traffic using DCF. After receiving data packets, the DC of the corresponding VLAN is decremented by transmission time of the packet. We use transmission time rather than the length in bytes to take into account the considerable overhead caused by interframe spaces and acknowledgement transmission. The transmission time of the packet during CF is given by:

T _ data + MAC header + physical layer overhead) dl - ( Rate + SIFS + Ack + SIF Then scheduler goes to next queue. This routine continues until there is no packet to send or no queue has sufficient DC or when the maximum CFP duration has elapsed. After that AP ends the Contention Free Period (CFP) and CP again begins. At the end of CFP, scheduler checks all queues. If a queue is empty, its DC is set to zero. With this strategy if stations from one logical network generate too much upload traffic, they will receive less download traffic. The sum of download and upload bandwidth of a logical network can not exceed its quota. We do not explicitly control upload bandwidth. However, dropping data frame due to overflow of the queues signals TCP congestion control mechanisms in stations to decrease the upload traffic. The algorithm of the Local Bandwidth Manger is simple and can be implemented in Wi-Fi switches. However because of the buffering, we need more memory space in the Wi-Fi switch and we also add some delay to packets.
4. SIMULATION RESULTS
We have used OPNET to simulate a WLAN as depicted in figure 2. All Cells use 802.1 lb as their physical layer. Data rate is 5.5 Mbps and the CFP repeats each 100 msec and its maximum duration is 50 msec. A 4 Mbsp WAN link is used to connect WLAN to FTP and HTTP servers. Two logical networks use WLAN as their access network. Station use either FTP or web browsing services. By sending and receiving files with constant size of 25 Kbyte and inter-request time of 1 to 3 seconds, each FTP stations has a long term bit rate of 100 Kbps which 80 Kbps of it is download traffic. Each HTTP station has long term bit rate of 8 Kbps. Figure 3 shows the throughput of a station from the second logical network in 3 different scenarios; 1) when the cell has low traffic load (20% of data rate) and both logical networks have same number of stations. 2) First logical network accept more users until cell load is medium (40% of the data rate). 3) More users from First logical network are accepted until the cell load is high (60% of the data rate). From this figure we can see that when the cell is congested by stations from the first logical network, throughput of the station from other logical network is reduced. This problem complicates the admission control and bandwidth management. The admission control entities in two different networks have to cooperate with each other to avoid crowding the WLAN cell.

data + MAC header ~ ~ + physical layer overhead) Rate + SIFS + Ack + DIFS For 802.1 lb standard, MAC header is 224 bits and physical layer overhead is 96 or 192 psec depending on if short or long frames are used. SIFS and DIFS are 10 and 50 psec respectively. The ACK frame is 14 byte and

T'l (
=

physical layer overhead is added to it. The overhead time for 802.1 lb with long format is 470 [tsec. During CFP, the scheduler checks if the first queue has enough DC to send its first packet. If it has, the packet is sent to AP and the DC is decremented by the packet transmission time which is given by:
%~~~~~~.

v->

Figure 1. Local Bandwidth Manager

Figure 4 and 5 are the results of using Cell Bandwidth Manger. Our fair queuing algorithm divides cell capacity equally between both logical networks. For both VLANs, Q is set to 40 msec and is granted to each logical network at the beginning of each CP. Figure 4 shows that even when the WLAN cell has high traffic load, throughput of that the station remains approximately constant. Figure 5 shows the upload bandwidth of the station also remains approximately constant.

4 ..

.vl1t'*_Ws whE4f_m
W X '-''}

J1.. i|. 1 .l11l- . -. } _

ax

L j

Figure 5. The upload bandwidth of the FTP station when Local Bandwidth Manager is used
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK In this paper we proposed an architecture that divides the WLAN resources between different logical networks in a fair manner. This strategy will simplify admission control and bandwidth management in shared WLANs. We showed that our method is capable of allocating bandwidth to different operators in a way that traffic from one logical network can not affect throughput of the users from another network. Even in cells with high load our algorithm has acceptable performance.
6. REFERENCES

...-.-_M D.>

Figure 2. Simulation scenario

Figure 3. Throughput of the FTP station when Local Bandwidth Manager is not used

[1] W. Zhuang et al., "Policy-Based QoS Management Architecture in an Integrated UMTS and WLAN Environment," IEEE Communication Magazine, Volume 41, Issue 11, Nov. 2003 Page(s):118 - 125 2003 [2] Aad, I., Castelluccia, C., "Introducing service differentiation into IEEE 802.1 1," IEEE ISCC'00, Page(s): 438 -443, July 2000. [3] R. S. Ranasinghe, Lachlan L.H. Andrew, "Distributed contention-free traffic scheduling in IEEE 802.11 multimedia networks, "10th IEEE Workshop on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks, Selected Papers, 1999 Page(s) 18 - 28 [4] Huan-Yun Wei, Ching-Chuang Chiang, Ying-Dar Lin, "CoDRR: an integrated uplink and downlink scheduler for bandwidth management over wireless LANs, "ISCC, Page(s): 1415 - 1420 vol.2, 2003 [5] M. Shreedhar, G. Varghese, "Efficient fair queuing using deficit round-robin, " IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 4, Issue 3, Page(s):375 - 385, 1996

Figure 4. Throughput of the FTP station when Local Bandwidth Manager is used