ath9k: Introduce airtime fairness scheduling between stations

This reworks the ath9k driver to schedule transmissions to connected
stations in a way that enforces airtime fairness between them. It
accomplishes this by measuring the time spent transmitting to or
receiving from a station at TX and RX completion, and accounting this to
a per-station, per-QoS level airtime deficit. Then, an FQ-CoDel based
deficit scheduler is employed at packet dequeue time, to control which
station gets the next transmission opportunity.

Airtime fairness can significantly improve the efficiency of the network
when station rates vary. The following throughput values are from a
simple three-station test scenario, where two stations operate at the
highest HT20 rate, and one station at the lowest, and the scheduler is
employed at the access point:

                  Before   /   After
Fast station 1:    19.17   /   25.09 Mbps
Fast station 2:    19.83   /   25.21 Mbps
Slow station:       2.58   /    1.77 Mbps
Total:             41.58   /   52.07 Mbps

The benefit of airtime fairness goes up the more stations are present.
In a 30-station test with one station artificially limited to 1 Mbps,
we have seen aggregate throughput go from 2.14 to 17.76 Mbps.

Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>
Signed-off-by: Kalle Valo <kvalo@qca.qualcomm.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/init.c b/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/init.c
index 20794660d6ae..084ad1bd495f 100644
--- a/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/init.c
+++ b/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/init.c
@@ -620,6 +620,8 @@ static int ath9k_init_softc(u16 devid, struct ath_softc *sc,
 
 	/* Will be cleared in ath9k_start() */
 	set_bit(ATH_OP_INVALID, &common->op_flags);
+	sc->airtime_flags = (AIRTIME_USE_TX | AIRTIME_USE_RX |
+			     AIRTIME_USE_NEW_QUEUES);
 
 	sc->sc_ah = ah;
 	sc->dfs_detector = dfs_pattern_detector_init(common, NL80211_DFS_UNSET);