Class-Based Weighted Window for TCP Fairness in WLANs

The explosive growth of the Internet has extended to the wireless domain. The number of Internet users and mobile devices with wireless Internet access is continuously increasing. However, the network resource is essentially limited, and fair service is a key issue in bandwidth allocation. In this research, the focus is on the issue of fairness among wireless stations having different number and direction of flows for different required bandwidth to ensure that fair channel is fairly shared between wireless stations in the same class of bandwidth. It is shown that the current WLANs allocate bandwidth unfairly. It is also identified that the cause of this problem of unfairness is the TCP cumulative ACK mechanism combined with the packet dropping mechanism of AP queue and the irregular space for each wireless station in AP queue. The proposed method allocate converged bandwidth by introducing a Class-Based Weighted Window method which adjusts the TCP window size based on the current conditions of the network and according to the network’s requirements. This method works in wireless stations without requiring any modification in MAC. It can guarantee fair service in terms of throughput among wireless users whether they require the same or different bandwidth.Wireless LAN, TCP, Fairness

Active Queue Management for Fair Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the interaction between end-to-end flow control and MAC-layer scheduling on wireless links. We consider a wireless network with multiple users receiving information from a common access point; each user suffers fading, and a scheduler allocates the channel based on channel quality,but subject to fairness and latency considerations. We show that the fairness property of the scheduler is compromised by the transport layer flow control of TCP New Reno. We provide a receiver-side control algorithm, CLAMP, that remedies this situation. CLAMP works at a receiver to control a TCP sender by setting the TCP receiver's advertised window limit, and this allows the scheduler to allocate bandwidth fairly between the users

Random Access Game and Medium Access Control Design

Motivated partially by a control-theoretic viewpoint, we propose a game-theoretic model, called random access game, for contention control. We characterize Nash equilibria of random access games, study their dynamics, and propose distributed algorithms (strategy evolutions) to achieve Nash equilibria. This provides a general analytical framework that is capable of modeling a large class of system-wide quality-of-service (QoS) models via the specification of per-node utility functions, in which system-wide fairness or service differentiation can be achieved in a distributed manner as long as each node executes a contention resolution algorithm that is designed to achieve the Nash equilibrium. We thus propose a novel medium access method derived from carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) according to distributed strategy update mechanism achieving the Nash equilibrium of random access game. We present a concrete medium access method that adapts to a continuous contention measure called conditional collision probability, stabilizes the network into a steady state that achieves optimal throughput with targeted fairness (or service differentiation), and can decouple contention control from handling failed transmissions. In addition to guiding medium access control design, the random access game model also provides an analytical framework to understand equilibrium and dynamic properties of different medium access protocols

The analysis of achieving TCP fairness in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure WLAN

This paper raising the TCP fairness issues that reviewed from three aspects; per-flow, per-station, and per-rate based on the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) environment.Due to the strong drive towards wireless Internet access via mobile devices, these issues must be carefully handled in order to build improved systems. We succinctly review and categorize the TCP fairness characteristic and then outline the problems and solutions from previous works through comparative table.Finally, we considered the future direction for solving these problems.Overall this paper summarizes current state of knowledge of the WLAN TCP fairness

Analytical Evaluation of Unfairness Problem in Wireless LANs

The number of users using wireless Local Area Network is increasing exponentially and their behavior is changing day after day. Nowadays, users of wireless LAN are using huge amount of bandwidth because of the explosive growth of some services and applications such as video sharing. This situation imposes massive pressure on the wireless LAN performance especially in term of fairness among wireless stations. The limited resources are not distributed fairly in saturated conditions. The most important resource is the access point buffer space. This importance is a result of access point being the bottleneck between two different types of networks. These two types are wired network with relatively huge bandwidth and wireless network with much smaller bandwidth. Also the unfairness problem is keep getting worse because of the greedy nature Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on wireless LAN dynamics and proposed a new mathematical model that describes the performance and effects of its behavior. We validate the proposed model by using the simulation technique. The proposed model was able to produce very good approximation in most of the cases. It also gave us a great insight into the effective variables in the wireless LAN behavior and what are the dimensions of the unfairness problem.Comment: Journal of Telecommunications,Volume 1, Issue 1, pp105-112, February 201

Agile-SD: A Linux-based TCP Congestion Control Algorithm for Supporting High-speed and Short-distance Networks

Recently, high-speed and short-distance networks are widely deployed and their necessity is rapidly increasing everyday. This type of networks is used in several network applications; such as Local Area Networks (LAN) and Data Center Networks (DCN). In LANs and DCNs, high-speed and short-distance networks are commonly deployed to connect between computing and storage elements in order to provide rapid services. Indeed, the overall performance of such networks is significantly influenced by the Congestion Control Algorithm (CCA) which suffers from the problem of bandwidth under-utilization, especially if the applied buffer regime is very small. In this paper, a novel loss-based CCA tailored for high-speed and Short-Distance (SD) networks, namely Agile-SD, has been proposed. The main contribution of the proposed CCA is to implement the mechanism of agility factor. Further, intensive simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of Agile-SD compared to Compound and Cubic which are the default CCAs of the most commonly used operating systems. The results of the simulation experiments show that the proposed CCA outperforms the compared CCAs in terms of average throughput, loss ratio and fairness, especially when a small buffer is applied. Moreover, Agile-SD shows lower sensitivity to the buffer size change and packet error rate variation which increases its efficiency.Comment: 12 Page

Buffer Sizing for 802.11 Based Networks

We consider the sizing of network buffers in 802.11 based networks. Wireless networks face a number of fundamental issues that do not arise in wired networks. We demonstrate that the use of fixed size buffers in 802.11 networks inevitably leads to either undesirable channel under-utilization or unnecessary high delays. We present two novel dynamic buffer sizing algorithms that achieve high throughput while maintaining low delay across a wide range of network conditions. Experimental measurements demonstrate the utility of the proposed algorithms in a production WLAN and a lab testbed.Comment: 14 pages, to appear on IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin