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TCP-CC: cross-layer TCP pacing protocol by contention control on wireless networks

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Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) performs poorly over wireless networks. Some research indicates that the TCP congestion control mechanism may cause burstiness in the traffic flow. Numerous TCP segments are delivered simultaneously, while an acknowledgement of a retransmission is successfully received. Burstiness leads to a highly contentious network, which markedly increases the probability of packet loss on wireless networks. TCP pacing is a possible solutions for TCP burstiness on multi-hop networks. In this algorithm, TCP segment transmissions are distributed over the whole Round Trip Time. Most pacing protocols attempt to insert a delay interval into the TCP transmissions. However, there is a similar pacing algorithm in IEEE802.11, known as the contention window mechanism. In this paper, we first measure and analyze the way that the contention window size affects TCP throughput in different scenarios. We propose a cross-layer TCP pacing protocol by contention control in the MAC layer, called TCP Contention Control (TCP-CC). It adjusts the lower bound of the contention window in order to optimize the overall TCP throughput in both one-hop and multi-hop topology. Finally, comparative simulations are conducted in order to verify the improvements of our protocol on both TCP Reno and TCP Vegas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 800 King Edward, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Hengheng Xie & Azzedine Boukerche

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  1. Hengheng Xie
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  2. Azzedine Boukerche
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Correspondence to Hengheng Xie.

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Xie, H., Boukerche, A. TCP-CC: cross-layer TCP pacing protocol by contention control on wireless networks. Wireless Netw 21, 1061–1078 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0833-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0833-8

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