Packet Size Aware Path Setup For Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose packet size aware path setup mechanisms for 802.11 based multi-hop WLAN networks. Path setup optimization is achieved by minimizing the transmission delay experienced by each packet traversing from source to the destination where different packets belonging to the same source destination pair can traverse different paths based on their sizes. We implemented a sample packet size aware path setup scheme as a Linux kernel module and experimentally showed the benefits of such a scheme in terms of the transmission delay and the throughput in an 802.11b WLAN environment. In addition to that we examine general path setup solutions for wireless networks considering packet size statistics.