Hi,
we discussed this in ath5k-devel, but it involves a mac80211 extension, so I'm
bringing it here.
Although Wi-Fi was designed for outdoor use, it's also sometimes used for long
distance outdoor links. However, long distance links require longer ACK
timeout, as packets travel "only" at the speed of light and every kilometer
adds almost 7 microseconds to the roundtrip. So for a driver to be usable
outdoors it has to permit setting ACK timeout from userspace.
Currently this is supported only by out-of-tree Madwifi driver for Atheros
hardware. However, modification of ACK timeout is not an Atheros specific
feature. According to a quick skim over the source code in
drivers/net/wireless, besides ath5k and ath9k it's at least supported by
rt2x00, rtl818x and maybe zd1211.
I think the current hardware support is sufficient for a generic mac80211
solution. The exact interpretation of ACK timeout value is hardware specific,
so I propose a higher level API operating with link distance.
It consists of a new nl80211 parameter:
[NL80211_ATTR_WIPHY_DISTANCE] = { .type = NLA_U32 },
The value of the parameter would be a link distance in meters, so after the
support is added to iw one could set the ACK timeout on a 3km link using:
# iw phy0 set distance 3000
Another required change would be extending cfg80211_ops by functions
set_distance and get_distance. Calculation of appropriate ACK timeout (and in
the case of ath5k, also CTS timeout and slottime) for the distance would be
left to the driver (it's a trivial formula).
I can prepare the patches, if you think these extension would be acceptable.
Suggestions are welcome.
Lukas Turek
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