A scheme for enhancing TCP fairness and throughput in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

In this paper, we consider two fairness problems that occur in the infrastructure network (fairness between TCP uplink/downlink flows and fairness between competing TCP uplink flows). A large number of existing works have studied the TCP fairness issues and greatly solved the TCP unfairness problems. However, these solutions suffer from the drawback of TCP throughput degradation even though the TCP unfairness problem can be solved. In order to solve these problems effectively, we propose a scheme that modifies the receiver window size on the basis of maximum window size which is able to maximize link utilization. We have evaluated our scheme with ns-2 simulator and the results demonstrate that our scheme greatly improves both the TCP fairness and total throughput. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.