Improving NFS performance over wireless links

Author

Dube, Rohit ; Rais, Cynthia D. ; Tripathi, Satish K.

Author_Institution

Mobile Comput. & Multimedia Lab., Maryland Univ., College Park, MD, USA

Volume

46

Issue

3

fYear

1997

fDate

3/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

290

Lastpage

298

Abstract

NFS is a widely used remote file access protocol that has been tuned to perform well on traditional LANs which exhibit low error rates. Users migrating to mobile hosts would like continued remote file access via NFS. However, low bandwidth and high error rates degrade performance on mobile hosts using wireless links, hindering the use of NFS. We conducted experiments to study the behaviour of NFS in a wireless testbed. Based on these experiments, we incorporated modifications into the mobile NFS client. This paper presents two mechanisms which improve NFS performance over wireless links: an aggressive NFS client and link-level retransmissions. Our experiments show that these mechanisms improve response time by up to 62%, which brings the performance to within 5% of that obtained in zero error conditions

Keywords

access protocols; file servers; performance evaluation; wireless LAN; NFS; link-level retransmission; mobile NFS client; mobile computing; mobile hosts; performance; remote file access protocol; wireless LAN; wireless links; wireless testbed; Access protocols; Bandwidth; Degradation; Delay; Error analysis; File systems; Mobile computing; Network servers; Testing; Wireless LAN;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computers, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9340

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/12.580425

Filename

580425