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I was thinking about bufferbloat & how to counter it in mac80211, in particular on the AP side, and had some thoughts about how it compares to wired, so I'm dumping some things here.
Consider a typical wired scenario:
machine A === 1000mbps link ==== [switch] === 1000mbps === machine B
|
+--- 100mbps link --- machine C
Now say A is pumping data to both B and C at very high speeds. Obviously the switch in the middle will start buffering a bit, and then drop frames to C, so the stream there will back off quite quickly. If you attempt to pump data to both at 300 mbps, the link to B will not be affected at all.
In wireless though, there's no switch in the middle. Say A is the AP, 3×3 HT, B is a client with 3×3 and C is a legacy 11g client. The maximum throughput to B might be 300mbps (is that even realistic? no matter) but to C it'll be 24mbps at most. However, here airtime is the limit, and A can't send 300+24mbps like it could on wired.
Obviously the fairness here will be different, and what should it be? Should both get the same throughput, even though that probably means C uses 80+% of airtime? Should both get the same airtime, so they can get 150 and 12 mbps respectively?
Regarding bufferbloat though the issue is worse because deeper queues are needed to feed the link to B than to C, but all the frames are sitting on the same queue today. And we really don't want to reserve 2007*4 queues (max stations * ACs) all the time …
