Peeling the 802.11 Onion: Separating Congestion from Physical PER

An ability to accurately classify observed packet errors according to their root cause: physical layer or MAC layer contention, in 802.11 networks, opens up many opportunities for performance im-provement at the both the MAC and IP layers. We investigate two orthogonal ways to achieve this, and present a methodology, the ‘map’, for clearly visualizing the results free of packet size and rate ‘bias’. Categories and Subject Descriptor