Abstract
Seamless redundancy layered atop Wi-Fi has been shown able to tangibly
increase communication quality, hence offering industry-grade
reliability. However, it also implies much higher network traffic, which
is often unbearable as the wireless spectrum is a shared and scarce
resource. To deal with this drawback the Wi-Red proposal includes
suitable duplication avoidance mechanisms, which reduce spectrum
consumption by preventing transmission on air of inessential frame
duplicates.
In this paper, the ability of such mechanisms to save wireless bandwidth
is experimentally evaluated. To this purpose, specific post-analysis
techniques have been defined, which permit to carry out such an
assessment on a simple testbed that relies on plain redundancy and do
not require any changes to the adapters’ firmware. As results show,
spectrum consumption decreases noticeably without communication quality
is impaired. Further saving can be obtained if a slight worsening is
tolerated for latencies.