Gateway adaptive pacing for TCP across multihop wireless networks and the Internet

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we introduce an effective congestion control scheme for TCP over hybrid wireless/wired networks comprising a multihop wireless IEEE 802.11 network and the wired Internet. We propose an adaptive pacing scheme at the Internet gateway for wired-to-wireless TCP flows. Furthermore, we analyze the causes for the unfairness of oncoming TCP flows and propose a scheme to throttle aggressive wired-to-wireless TCP flows at the Internet gateway to achieve nearly optimal fairness. Thus, we denote the introduced congestion control scheme TCP with Gateway Adaptive Pacing (TCP-GAP). For wireless-to-wired flows, we propose an adaptive pacing scheme at the TCP sender. In contrast to previous work, TCP-GAP does not impose any control traffic overhead for achieving fairness among active TCP flows. Moreover, TCP-GAP can be incrementally deployed because it does not require any modifications of TCP in the wired part of the network and is fully TCP-compatible. Extensive simulations using ns-2 show that TCP-GAP is highly responsive to varying traffic conditions, provides nearly optimal fairness in all scenarios and achieves up to 42% more goodput than TCP NewReno.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.0 General
          Subjects: Data communications

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Performance

Keywords:
TCP congestion control for hybrid wireless/wired networks, ad hoc networks, performance evaluation, wireless network protocols