Welcome to 1997. ;-D
Traffic shaping does take a huge difference, but there are many alternatives to frottle. FreeBSD Dummynet, Linux CBQ, YDI BCU, ETInc, Allot, Packateer, Mikrotik, Cisco rate-limit, etc etc etc.
Frottle is different, in that you control timing/access to the wireless medium. That is, you effectively replace the media access part of the 802.11 MAC with a token system.
Each client has a Linux gateway box that will only forward packets to the wireless side when it receives a token that tells it to go ahead. A device on the AP end does the media control and sends tokens to clients.
The effect is that you just ignore CSMA/CA, RTS/CTS and hidden node problems because frottle controls which client can send when by sending tokens to the gateway boxes.
Would it be more efficient to have this implemented as a part of 802.11 instead of implementing it in the application layer on small Linux boxes? Definately. But it is none the less a cool hack, and does illustrate that a token/polling algorithm helps in situations where the 802.11 MAC breaks down. Sort of a free (except for the hardware) Karlnet light.
-- LarsG
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