Computer Science News

USENIX ATC 2014 Best Paper Award

Photos of the authors

Lynne Salameh and Astrit Zhushi, two PhD students in the Systems and Networks Research Group at UCL CS, have won the Best Paper Award at the USENIX ATC 2014 conference for their paper: Salameh, L., Zhushi, A., Handley, M., Jamieson, K., and Karp, B., "HACK: Hierarchical ACKs for Efficient Wireless Medium Utilization".

This work tackles a pressing problem in the building of high-speed WiFi networks. Continual improvements to WiFi's physical layer in principle support data transfer at ever-greater bit-rates. But for network applications that send data using the TCP protocol, which account for most of the traffic on today's WiFi networks, the overhead incurred in the sending of TCP acknowledgements by a WiFi receiver significantly limits the data transfer rate achievable in practice.

Salameh and Zhushi solve this problem by introducing a novel cross-layer optimization for TCP traffic on WiFi networks that encapsulates TCP acknowledgement information within WiFi's link-layer acknowledgements. This optimization, which they call Hierarchical ACKnowledgements (HACK), nicely mitigates the overhead of sending TCP acknowledgements over WiFi. In experiments conducted with a built prototype, HACK improves TCP throughput by up to 32% over "stock" WiFi.


Posted 22 Sep 14 07:48
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