BLMon: A Loss Differentiation Scheme for 802.11n

An important problem in 802.11 wireless networks is to accurately differentiate between losses while incurring low overhead. Lack of loss differentiation can result in throughput degradation, which becomes increasingly severe as data rates scale up. This paper presents BLMon, a loss differentiation scheme for 802.11n networks that leverages loss patterns in aggregate frames and frame retries to distinguish between losses. BLMon achieves high accuracy, incurs low overhead and does not require any protocol changes or customized hardware support.