Jason said:
I have a wireless network in my home. I am using the
802.11b standard. My problem is that when ever I do a
file tranfer between machines, only 10% of the bandwidth
is getting utilized. Can someone please give some advice
on how to fix this problem? Thank you.
I hate to disappoint you, but that may be as fast as you are going to get.
One thing I've never seen written up about 802.11b networks is that if you
send files between two machines both talking to a wireless access
point/router, each packet of the file is sent over the airwaves twice, once
from the sending machine to the access point and once from the access point
to the receiving machine. In addition, acknowledgements also flow over the
same links, and all have to share the same 11Mb/s raw bandwidth. This of
course causes contention, which consumes more bandwidth to resolve. Add in
protocol overheads and recovery from lost packets and it doesn't leave much.
The best rate I've been able to get out of my network is about
200Kbytes/second or 1.6Mbits/second or 14.5% of the rated throughput. That,
however, is just the peak rate and the raw transfer rate. My benchmarking
is moving a 200 meg audio file, which, at a net throughput of 1.1 megabit
(10% of the network throughput) should take about 24 minutes if I haven't
missed anything. I rarely manage to move them that fast.
So, the alternatives: If you can connect one of your machines directly to
the access point (not wirelessly), you will get about 2-1/2 times more
throughput and more reliability. Going to 802.11g will give you a speed
increase too, but again don't expect it to give you more than 10% of that
54 megabits if both sender and receiver are connected wirelessly.
