Centrino power save problem with HostAP

Tue Sep 16 11:04:24 EDT 2003

Thanks Motoyuki,

It turns out that it wasn't my firmware (1.4.9) that was the problem but 
rather the hardware. I was using an older Linksys card that actually 
carried a hardware  address with a vendor ID that mapped to a company 
called Global Sun Tech. I'm guessing this was an older chipset than I was 
expecting. Anyway, an upgrade to a newer Linksys card (really WPC11 ver 3 
this time) with STA firmware 1.4.9 resulted in Ack's being returned within 
300 microseconds which was good enough for the Centrino, which seems to 
retransmit at about 800 microseconds if it doesn't get the Ack.

Interestingly, I tried STA 1.7.4, the latest and greatest firmware for my 
flavor of hardware and it seems to work with no Ack...the Centrino sends a 
power save request and everything goes quiet without an Ack coming back. Is 
it possible that the client and AP can negotiate the types of transmissions 
that require an Ack? Or did my sniffer start missing some packets? Curious. 
My read of the 802.11 spec indicates that negotiation of power save 
requires an Ack. It also seems that regular data transmission has far fewer 
Acks under STA 1.7.4 than with 1.4.9. Does anyone know why?

Thanks again,

Larry

At 02:09 AM 16/09/03 +0900, Motoyuki OHMORI wrote:
>Hi Larry,
>
>I'm newbie of this list, but I'd like to post because
>I have experienced same situation as you mentioned.
>
>When I was using PRISM2 based card with primary firmware 0.3.0 and
>station firmware 0.8.0, Ack for Null function was not sent by the
>card. Instead, host AP driver seemed to send it in kernel.
>However, the Ack was too late for Centrino clients to receive it.
>
>After all, I upgraded station firmware to 1.7.1, then my problem
>was fixed.
>
>P.S.
>I think that some *BSD_-current_s support power save mode.
>
>Regards,
>---
>Motoyuki OHMORI <ohmori at dontaku.csce.kyushu-u.ac.jp>
>Araki Laboratory, Department of C.S.C.E.,
>Graduate School of I.S.E.E., Kyushu University, Japan
>
>On Sun, 14 Sep 2003 18:07:34 -0700
>larry.leblanc at shaw.ca wrote:
>
> > This is a follow up to my earlier post...
> >
> > I've been having some problems with the interaction between a Centrino 
> laptop and my hostap access point (HostAP 0.0.4, Linksys WPC11 ver 3 card 
> with STA firmware 1.4.9). In particular I am having a problem with power 
> save mode, in which TCP communication seems to grind to a halt. I would 
> expect throughput to drop considerably in power save mode due to the 
> polling nature of the data transfer. However I would not expect 
> everything to grind to a halt unless packets/frames were being lost, and 
> since I am in a lab environment (good signal, close proximity, no 
> interference) that shouldn't happen.
> >
> > I am in the process of acquiring an 802.11 sniffer so I can see exactly 
> what is going on but in the meantime I have made use of a demo version to 
> look at what happens when the Centrino tries to negotiate power save mode 
> with the AP. The scenario I tested was:
> >
> > - Set Centrino driver to max performance setting so it won't try to go 
> into power save mode.
> > - set the sniffer to filter out beacons
> > - start tracing - observe the link is idle (other than the filtered 
> beacons)
> > - switch the Centrino driver to max battery life mode so it attempts to 
> go into power save mode.
> >
> > The resulting trace looks something like this (C = Centrino, A = AP):
> >
> > Time (microsec)  Event
> > ---------------  ------------------------
> >         0        C->A: empty data packet with PS=1
> >       888        C->A: empty data packet with PS=1, Retransmit=1
> >      1640        C->A: RTS
> >      1959        A->C: CTS
> >      2383        C->A: empty data packet with PS=1, Retransmit=1
> >      3155        A->C: Ack with PS=0
> >      4315        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >      4975        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >      9405        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     14796        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     16311        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     20018        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     20662        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     33221        C->A: empty packet with PS=1
> >     34030        C->A: empty packet with PS=1, Retransmit=1
> >     34802        C->A: RTS
> >     35121        A->C: CTS
> >     35546        C->A: empty packet with PS=1, Retransmit=1
> >     36254        A->C: Ack with PS=0, Retransmit=1
> >     ...<the sequence repeats indefinitely>...
> >
> > So, what I take from this is that the Centrino attempts to tell the AP 
> that it is going into power save mode and doesn't get an ack so it 
> retransmits the request. It still doesn't get an ack, so it sends an RTS, 
> gets a CTS and sends its request yet again. Finally an ack comes back, 
> but the PS bit is 0. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not. I'm also 
> not sure why the AP retransmits its Ack 7 times.
> >
> > So is this normal? It seems to me that there should be a single packet 
> sent from the Centrino to the AP and one Ack back. Then everything should 
> be quiet until the Centrino decides to poll for data. Based on what I've 
> heard from Intel, the Centrino won't poll for data until it receives a 
> DTIM indicating there is data waiting, so in my test case the link should 
> just go quiet.
> >
> > Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Larry LeBlanc
> >
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