A measurement study of multiplicative overhead effects in wireless networks

In this paper, we perform an extensive measurement study on a multi-tier mesh network serving 4,000 users. Such dense mesh deployments have high levels of interaction across heterogeneous wireless links. We find that this heterogeneous backhaul consisting of data-carrying (forwarding) links and non-data-carrying (non-forwarding) links creates two key effects on performance. First, we show that low-rate management and control packets can produce a disproportionally large degradation in data throughput. We define a metric for this effect called Wireless Overhead Multiplier and use it to quantify the impact of MAC and PHY mechanisms in the the throughput degradation. Surprisingly, we show that these multiplicative effects are primarily driven by the non-forwarding links where, in the worst case, data packets lose physical layer capture to the overhead, yielding disproportionate throughput degradation. Finally, we show that when data flows contend in this worst-case scenario, the loss-based autorate policy is unnecessarily triggered, causing throughput imbalance and poor network utilization.