What Is VIP Lane?
Huawei's VIP Lane mechanism dynamically allocates exclusive wireless transmission resources to VIP users on demand, ensuring VIP user experience. Specific technologies include VIP FastPass and VIP per-packet power control.
How Are VIP Lanes Generated?
On a WLAN, a channel utilization of more than 80% suggests there is network congestion, which may cause service suspension, poor user experience, and even service loss on STAs. However, traditional wireless network scheduling policies cannot distinguish VIP users from common users, so all users contend for the same network resources. The problem is, key services such as online conferencing need to be preferentially guaranteed for VIP users such as enterprise CXOs. To achieve this, the IT department needs to focus on the network experience of such services as well as offering quick issue response and closure.
This is where the VIP Lane mechanism comes in. This mechanism provides differentiated service assurance based on users, so that the VIP user experience is not compromised even by wireless network congestion. Specific technologies include VIP FastPass and VIP per-packet power control.
How Does VIP FastPass Work?
When there is wireless network congestion, traditional VIP resource reservation solutions can only ensure that data of VIP users enters high-priority queues inside APs, without being able to guarantee timely data transmission over the air interface. If there are severe signal collisions on the air interface, these solutions cannot provide deterministic latency assurance. To address this, VIP FastPass reserves air interface time slices for uplink and downlink traffic of VIP users when network congestion occurs. This ensures the controllable latency in sending and receiving wireless packets of VIP users.
Time slice allocation by VIP FastPass
In a single transmission period, VIP FastPass reserves 25% time slices for VIP users. Within the reserved time slices, VIP users are allocated equal amounts of bandwidth; within the remaining 75% time slices, VIP users and common users compete for bandwidth resources.
To better ensure the experience of VIP users, VIP FastPass also restricts the number of VIP users and allocable bandwidth.
- Restriction on the number of VIP users: By default, a maximum of five VIP users are supported. With the default settings, the average latency of VIP users does not exceed 50 ms in congestion scenarios. If the number of VIP FastPass users is manually set to 10, the average latency of VIP users is kept within 100 ms.
- Restriction on the allocable bandwidth for VIP users: The bandwidth reserved for each VIP user equals the air interface bandwidth divided by the number of VIP users. That means the latency and packet loss of traffic beyond the reserved bandwidth cannot be guaranteed by VIP FastPass. In most cases, the traffic of VIP users' key services (such as voice and video services) does not occupy much bandwidth (usually no more than 4 Mbit/s). Additionally, APs will preferentially schedule the traffic in the high-priority video (VI) and voice (VO) queues during the reserved time slices. Therefore, the voice and video service experience can be largely guaranteed for VIP users.
How Does VIP Per-Packet Power Control Work?
When a VIP user's STA moves or is associated with an AP far away from it, the negotiated bandwidth and throughput of the STA decrease as the distance between the STA and AP increases. In this case, the VIP user experience cannot be efficiently improved by VIP FastPass. Against this backdrop, VIP per-packet power control technology is introduced. This technology enables an AP to dynamically measure the downlink AP signal strength received by a VIP user's STA. Through intelligent measurement, the AP adjusts the transmit power for the STA on a per-packet basis in a weak-signal scenario (signal strength < –68 dBm). This achieves a more than 20% increase in the throughput of the VIP user's STA.
Effect of VIP per-packet power control
The measurement mechanism can be implemented in two solutions. One solution calculates the path loss based on the STA signal strength received by the AP and the estimated power of the STA. The other solution obtains the AP's signal strength measured by the STA through 802.11k messages. However, the power of STAs is uncertain. For example, the power of one STA may be 17 dBm, and that of another may be 20 dBm. Therefore, the path loss measured based on the packets sent by STAs may be inaccurate. As such, VIP per-packet power control combines the two solutions to address the measurement errors caused by the uncertain power of STAs as well as achieving more accurate power adjustment.
- Author: Zhou Xia
- Updated on: 2024-10-21
- Views: 801
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