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Analytical Study of TCP Performance over IEEE 802.11e WLANs

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Abstract

IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) has become a prevailing solution for broadband wireless Internet access while the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport-layer protocol in the Internet. Therefore, it is critical to have a good understanding of the TCP dynamics over WLANs. In this paper, we conduct rigorous and comprehensive modeling and analysis of the TCP performance over the emerging 802.11e WLANs, or more specifically, the 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) WLANs. We investigate the effects of minimum contention window sizes and transmission opportunity (TXOP) limits (of both the AP and stations) on the aggregate TCP throughput via analytical and simulation studies. We show that the best aggregate TCP throughput performance can be achieved via AP’s contention-free access for downlink packet transmissions and the TXOP mechanism. We also study the effects of some simplifying assumptions used in our analytical model, and simulation results show that our model is reasonably accurate, particularly, when the wireline delay is small and/or the packet loss rate is low.

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Notes

  1. The TCP window sizes are actually maintained in bytes. In our model, for simplicity, we assume that the TCP Data packets have a fixed size and are transmitted at a fixed rate. Hence, the TCP window sizes can be measured in packets. Similar analysis could be done for variable packet sizes and multi-rate WLANs, which is omitted due to space limitation.

  2. Actually, typical TCP configurations of commercial operating systems use a larger receive window size, e.g., the 12-packet (or 17520-byte) window used in MS Windows XP. We basically consider the 4-packet receive window size in order to reduce the calculation overhead; similar trends can be observed for other receive window sizes.

  3. In this paper, TCP Ack processing delay is defined as time duration between a TCP Data reception and the corresponding TCP Ack arrival at the MAC Service Access Point (SAP).

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Acknowledgements

This work was in part supported by the ITRC support program of MKE/IITA (IITA-2008-C1090-0801-0013 and IITA-2008-C1090-0803-0004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering and INMC, Seoul National University, Seoul, 151-744, Korea

    Jeonggyun Yu & Sunghyun Choi

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA

    Daji Qiao

Authors
  1. Jeonggyun Yu
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  2. Sunghyun Choi
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  3. Daji Qiao
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Correspondence to Sunghyun Choi.

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Yu, J., Choi, S. & Qiao, D. Analytical Study of TCP Performance over IEEE 802.11e WLANs. Mobile Netw Appl 14, 470–485 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-008-0111-z

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