2nd International ICST Workshop on Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

Research Article

Queue Management Strategies to Improve TCP Fairness in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666503,
        author={Mingwei Gong and Qian Wu and Carey  Williamson},
        title={Queue Management Strategies to Improve TCP Fairness in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs},
        proceedings={2nd International ICST Workshop on Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={RAWNET},
        year={2006},
        month={8},
        keywords={IEEE 802.11 WLAN TCP fairness ns-2},
        doi={10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666503}
    }
    
  • Mingwei Gong
    Qian Wu
    Carey Williamson
    Year: 2006
    Queue Management Strategies to Improve TCP Fairness in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs
    RAWNET
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/WIOPT.2006.1666503
Mingwei Gong1,*, Qian Wu1,*, Carey Williamson1,*
  • 1: Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary
*Contact email: gongm@cpsc.ucalgary.ca, qianwu@cpsc.ucalgary.ca, carey@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 technology have become increasingly popular and ubiquitous. The 802.11 standard allows each station in a WLAN equal opportunity to access the wireless channel, which can result in unfair sharing of network bandwidth between upstream and downstream TCP flows at an AP. In this paper, we propose two different queue management techniques to alleviate the unfairness problem, with one based on Selective Packet Marking (SPM), and the other based on Least Attained Service (LAS) scheduling. We evaluate these proposed solutions using the ns-2 network simulator. The simulation results show that, compared to a conventional DropTail queue mechanism for NewReno TCP sources, the proposed solutions improve the fairness index by 20-40%, while achieving comparable aggregate throughput.