TCP Fairness over Wireless Local Area Networks
As local area wireless networks based on the IEEE
802.11 standard see increasing public deployment, it is important to ensure that access to the network by
different users remains fair. While fairness issues in 802.11 networks have been studied before, we focus on TCP
fairness in 802.11 networks in the presence of both mobile senders and receivers. We evaluate extensively
through analysis, simulation, and experimentation the interaction between the 802.11 MAC protocol and TCP.
We identified four different regions of TCP unfairness that depend on the buffer availability at the base station,
with some regions exhibiting significant unfairness of over 10 in terms of throughput ratio between upstream
and downstream TCP flows. We have also proposed a simple solution that can be implemented at the base
station above the MAC layer that ensures that different TCP flows share the 802.11 bandwidth equitably
irrespective of the buffer availability at the base station.
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