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

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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.

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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
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  2. Qing-An Zeng
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  3. Xiaolong Li
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Correspondence to Aruna Thangaraj.

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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

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

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