A Scheme for Improving TCP Fairness and Throughput in Wireless Networks

Abstract

TCP suffers from poor throughput performance in wireless networks. Furthermore, when multiple TCP connections compete at a base station, link errors and congestion are likely to lead to serious unfairness among the connections. Although the issue of TCP performance in wireless networks has attracted significant attention, most reports focus only on TCP throughput and assume that there is only a single connection in a congestion-free network. To improve TCP fairness and throughput, we introduce a new scheme that integrates two independent components, namely, rate-based feedback congestion control and explicit window adaptation. We also propose a simple Linear Explicit Window Adaptation (LEWA) algorithm to be used in the scheme. The scheme is evaluated by simulation using ns2 and the results show that, by eliminating buffer overflows caused by congestion, it provides guaranteed fairness and has certain improvement on effective throughput.