Dynamic Bandwidth in hw rate control

[Ben Greear]

On 06/16/2016 03:44 PM, Gaurang Ramesh Naik wrote:
> Thanks Ben and Dave for your replies. So what I understand is that
> dynamic bandwidth management is a part of the rate control algorithm
> (which is implemented in firmware) and hence I have not much control
> over how that works.

With stock firmware you have very little control, though newer stock
firmware has some tweaks to rate-ctrl that the driver does not yet
support.

With my firmware and driver, you can at least disable any particular rate.
So, you could disable all 40Mhz rates, for instance.  I'm not sure how
useful that would be...

> I am assuming your firmware is the one that can be downloaded from
> http://www.candelatech.com/ath10k.php Is your kernel a modified one
> too? When you say I can see the tx rate for each frame, is it through
> some logs? I could try to get some info by using that. Thanks again.

Please read that page, it has links to kernel source.

tx-rate will be reported up the stack in a normal manner (ie, somewhat like
ath9k does it).  You could instrument the kernel to save a histogram of
tx-rates or something similar, perhaps.  'iw dev wlan0 station dump' and
similar will now show expected tx rate, but that is an average or maybe
the last tx rate reported, so it does not give a detailed view of
what is happening.

You can also sniff the air and see the rates in that manner (on any
firmware, including stock).

> Slightly unrelated, but is there a way I can play around with PIFS
> value? I could not locate it in the ath10k source, so I am assuming it
> is implemented in the firmware. I am trying to study some fairness
> issues when legacy devices operate in the secondary channels.

I don't have time to dig into this right now, but if you don't
see anything in the driver related to this, then probably it requires
firmware changes.

Thanks,
Ben


>
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com> wrote:
>> On 06/16/2016 12:57 PM, Gaurang Ramesh Naik wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Ben,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply.
>>>
>>> I wanted to know if the dynamic bandwidth option implemented in ath10k
>>> is the same as that mentioned in the standard, or does it deviate? I
>>> tried to look for any documentation on ath10k dynamic bandwidth, but
>>> could not find any.
>>>
>>> If I am not wrong, on the secondary channel, the sender senses the
>>> channel for PIFS interval of time immediately preceding the start of
>>> the TXOP (9.19.2.8 in the standard). In the static mode, if the
>>> secondary channel is sensed busy, the sender waits until all channels
>>> become idle; but in the dynamic mode, the sender sends on the primary
>>> and (adjacent) secondary channel that are not busy.
>>>
>>> However, the documentation for dynamic bandwidth in ath10k/mac.c seems
>>> to suggest that the transmission retries are carried over narrower
>>> bandwidth in dynamic mode. Does this mean the same as what is given in
>>> the standard? Or is the dynamic mode implemented differently? Any help
>>> is appreciated.
>>
>>
>> I don't know exactly how this works.  At least the sensing and stuff is
>> probably
>> baked into the hardware.  What I notice is that the firmware passes a series
>> of rates to the hardware to use for each packet, and it includes different
>> bandwidth rates.
>>
>> If you used my firmware and my kernel, you can see the (successful) transmit
>> rate for each frame.  Perhaps you could discover some info about how it
>> works
>> in that manner if you could reliably add noise on an adjacent channel.
>>
>> Upstream firmware can see tx rates using pktlog I think, but I have
>> never tried that.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ben
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Gaurang.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 1:23 AM, Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 06/08/2016 08:10 PM, Gaurang Ramesh Naik wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I needed a small clarification related to dynamic bandwidth setup. The
>>>>> documentation in wmi.h says " When enabled HW rate control tries
>>>>> different bandwidths when retransmitting frames."
>>>>>
>>>>> Does this mean that each packet is first always tried over VHT80 and
>>>>> if that fails it goes to HT40 and then to HT20? I tried this with one
>>>>> AP-Sta operating in VHT80 and one AP operating in its first secondary
>>>>> channel. When I check the rx rate info using "iw dev wlanx station
>>>>> dump", the bandwidth seems to sometimes alternate between 20 and 80,
>>>>> but sometimes it stays fixed at 20. Hence, I was wondering what really
>>>>> happens.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For one thing, if the hardware detects interference on secondary
>>>> channels,
>>>> then it may decide to transmit a 20Mhz encoding.
>>>>
>>>> The rate-ctrl algs in the firmware differ from release to release, but
>>>> the general goal is to transmit with the fastest encoding rate.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Ben
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Gaurang.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> ath10k mailing list
>>>>> ath10k at lists.infradead.org
>>>>> http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/ath10k
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>>>> Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ath10k mailing list
>>> ath10k at lists.infradead.org
>>> http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/ath10k
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
>> Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
>>
>


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com