Improving NFS Performance over Wireless Links

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 to continue to use NFS for remote file accesses. However, low bandwidth and high error-rates degrade performance on mobile-hosts using wireless links thus hindering the use of NFS. In this paper, we present two mechanisms to improve NFS performance over wireless links : an aggressive NFS client and link-level retransmissions. Our experiments show that these mechanisms improve throughput by up to 200%, which brings the performance to within 5% of that obtained in zero error conditions. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-126)