Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11e wireless networks with TCP ACK prioritization

  • Published:
Telecommunication Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

With the advent of multimedia over wireless local area networks, the IEEE 802.11e standard was proposed to incorporate Quality of Service (QoS). It has been found that the throughput of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is less than that of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in the IEEE 802.11e. This is because the TCP acknowledgment packets are queued up at the access points. In this paper, two types of TCP acknowledgment prioritizing schemes are proposed. The proposed schemes improve the overall throughput of TCP while maintaining the QoS requirements. We also analyze the problem of starvation of lower priority traffic and its effects on the performance of lower priority TCP traffic. The proposed dynamic scheme of TCP acknowledgment prioritization aims at improving the throughput of the lower priority TCP traffic under heavy network load while maintaining the QoS requirements of the higher priority traffic. The schemes have been verified through extensive simulation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.

References

  1. Aad, I., & Castelluccia, C. (2001). Differentiation mechanisms for IEEE 802.11. In Proceedings of IEEE Infocom 2001 (Vol. 1, pp. 209–218), Anchorage, Alaska, USA.

  2. Deng, J., & Chang, R. S. (1999). A priority scheme for IEEE 802.11 DCF access method. IEICE Transactions in Communications, 82-B, 96–102.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Pang, Q., Liew, S. C., Lee, J. Y. B., & Chan, S. H. G. (2004). A TCP-like adaptive contention window for WLAN. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on communications, 2004 (Vol. 6, pp. 3723–3727).

  4. IEEE 802.11e/D8.0. Draft supplement to part 11: Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications: Medium Access Control (MAC) quality of service enhancements, February 2004.

  5. Mangold, S., Choi, S., May, P., & Klein, O. (2003). Analysis of IEEE 802.11e for quality of service support in wireless LANs. Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications, 10, 40–50.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Choi, S., Prado, J., Shankar, S., & Mangold, S. (2003). IEEE 802.11e contention-based channel access (EDCF) performance evaluation. In IEEE international conference on communications 2003 (Vol. 2, pp. 1151–1156).

  7. Balakrishnan, H., & Padmanabhan, V. (2001). How network asymmetry affects TCP. IEEE Communications Magazine, 39, 60–67.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Lenagala, R., & Zeng, Q.-A. (2006). Starvation prevention scheme for the IEEE 802.11e EDCF using dynamic MAC layer parameters. In Proceedings of the 5rd IEEE annual Wireless Telecommunications Symposium (WTS 2006), California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California, USA, April 27–29, 2006.

  9. Pilosof, S., Ramjee, R., Shavitt, Y., & Sinha, P. (2003). Understanding TCP fairness over wireless LAN. Proceedings of Infocomm, 2, 863–872.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ni, Q., Romdhani, L., & Turletti, T. (2004). A survey of QoS enhancements for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN. Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 4(5), 547–566.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Selvig, B., Bai, A., Skeie, T., & Engelstad., P. (2005). Differentiated services in 802.11e WLANs. In Norwegian Network Research Seminar (NNRS’2005), Oslo, Norway, October 27–28, 2005.

  12. Pang, Q., Liew, S. C., & Leung, V. C. M. (2004). Performance improvement of 802.11 wireless access network with TCP ACK agent and auto-zoom backoff algorithm. In Proceedings of the 4th international IEEE conference of wireless and mobile networks.

  13. Leith, D. J., Clifford, P., Malone, D., & Ng, A. (2005). TCP fairness in IEEE 802.11e WLANs. IEEE Communications Letters, 9(11), 964–966.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lengala, R., & Zeng, Q.-A. (2006). Study of dynamic MAC parameters in for starvation prevention in the IEEE 802.11e MAC layer protocol. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE international conference on wireless and mobile computing networking and communications (WiMob 2006) (pp. 124–131), Montreal, Canada, June 19–21, 2006.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0030, USA

    Aruna Thangaraj

  2. Department of Electronics, Computer and Information Technology, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, 27411, USA

    Qing-An Zeng

  3. Department of Electronics, Computer & Mechanical Engineering Technology, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, 47809, USA

    Xiaolong Li

Authors
  1. Aruna Thangaraj
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Qing-An Zeng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xiaolong Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aruna Thangaraj.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Thangaraj, A., Zeng, QA. & Li, X. Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11e wireless networks with TCP ACK prioritization. Telecommun Syst 45, 303–312 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-009-9268-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-009-9268-4

Keywords