WLAN latency (was Re: WLAN with Linux SDIO: sneak preview)

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Mon Nov 10 16:58:35 CET 2008


Joerg Reisenweber wrote:
> WLAN-hw automatically entering power-save-mode comes to mind. Leaving this 
> fast power-save mode on detection of heavy traffic.

WLAN secretly conspiring with GSM ? ;-) It could indeed be something
like this, although my current suspect is interrupt signaling between
WLAN module and kernel. We already know that the driver is picking up
interrupts where there should be none, and that it apparently
sometimes misses interrupts as well.

I have some more data: in order to determine whether this affects the
transmit path, the receive path, or both, I wrote a basic "one-way
ping" (for simplicity, it uses UDP instead of ICMP):
http://svn.openmoko.org/developers/werner/owping/

It works as follows: the sending application puts a timestamps into
each packet it sends. The receiving application obtains the packet
timestamp attached by the networking stack (i.e., the time the packet
was seen at the interface) and its own current application-layer time.
The one-way times are the differences between these values and the
sender's timestamp, minus any difference between the sender's and the
receiver's clock.

First some baseline data on the path PC-(ether)-AP-(WLAN)-laptop.
Clocks were crudely synchronized by running ntpdate on both sides
before the test.

PC->laptop:
received 99 packets
itf: min/avg/max/sdev = -5.773/14.762/37.676/12.033 ms
app: min/avg/max/sdev = -5.748/14.787/37.701/12.033 ms

Laptop->PC:
received 99 packets
itf: min/avg/max/sdev = 5.274/10.152/22.472/3.638 ms
app: min/avg/max/sdev = 5.302/10.176/22.466/3.640 ms

Now let's look at the Neo. The path is PC-(ether)-AP-(WLAN)-Neo.

Neo->PC:
received 100 packets
itf: min/avg/max/sdev = -29.613/-24.699/14.443/5.119 ms
app: min/avg/max/sdev = -29.596/-24.677/14.465/5.119 ms

The standard deviation is excellent. The negative end-to-end time is
caused by the clocks not being perfectly synchronized. This doesn't
matter since we're only interested in delay variations here.

PC->Neo:
received 100 packets
itf: min/avg/max/sdev = 29.222/93.890/338.450/50.635 ms
app: min/avg/max/sdev = 30.345/94.968/339.494/50.633 ms

And here we meet the problem again. A standard deviation of 50ms is
clearly excessive.

While we don't know the exact one-way time, we know from the ping
experiments that it has an upper bound of 80ms, which means that the
outliers are above 350ms.

Since both application and interface time show the same pattern, this
indicates that the problem happens somewhere in the lower reaches of
the stack, i.e., either in the WLAN module, the SDIO driver, the
communication between the two, the SDIO stack, the Atheros WLAN stack,
or its interface to the regular Linux networking stack.

- Werner



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