Fair and Efficient TCP Access in the IEEE 802.11 Infrastructure Basic Service Set

Abstract: When the stations in an IEEE 802.11 infrastructure Basic Service Set (BSS) employ Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in the transport layer, this exacerbates per-flow unfair access which is a direct result of uplink/downlink bandwidth asymmetry in the BSS. We propose a novel and simple analytical model to approximately calculate the per-flow TCP congestion window limit that provides fair and efficient TCP access in a heterogeneous wired-wireless scenario. The proposed analysis is unique in that it considers the effects of varying number of uplink and downlink TCP flows, differing Round Trip Times (RTTs) among TCP connections, and the use of delayed TCP Acknowledgment (ACK) mechanism. Motivated by the findings of this analysis, we design a link layer access control block to be employed only at the Access Point (AP) in order to resolve the unfair access problem. The novel and simple idea of the proposed link layer access control block is employing a congestion control and filtering algorithm on TCP ACK packets of uplink flows, thereby prioritizing the access of TCP data packets of downlink flows at the AP. Via simulations, we show that short- and long-term fair access can be provisioned with the introduction of the proposed link layer access control block to the protocol stack of the AP while improving channel utilization and access delay.