Research Article
Cross-Layer based Congestion Control for WLANs
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.QSHINE2008.3845, author={Lei Zhang and Patrick S\^{e}nac and Emmanuel Lochin and Michel Diaz}, title={Cross-Layer based Congestion Control for WLANs}, proceedings={5th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness}, publisher={ICST}, proceedings_a={QSHINE}, year={2010}, month={5}, keywords={TFRC CSMA/CA mobile network MAC layer}, doi={10.4108/ICST.QSHINE2008.3845} }- Lei Zhang
Patrick Sénac
Emmanuel Lochin
Michel Diaz
Year: 2010
Cross-Layer based Congestion Control for WLANs
QSHINE
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ICST.QSHINE2008.3845
Abstract
Congestion control is a fundamental mechanism for the stability of the Internet and is a central mechanism for TCP. However, this congestion control mechanism focuses mainly on the core network state and is blind to the characteristics of wireless and mobile access networks. Moreover, TCP window based congestion control ignores totally application layer QoS needs and entails throughput variations which are not compliant with application layer QoS constraints such as bandwidth, delay and jitter. The TCP-Friendly Rate Control protocol (TFRC) was originally designed in the context of wired networks. This protocol is one of the most convincing attempt to provide a congestion control mechanism adapted to multimedia flows, although limited in its capacity to fully address these issues. After an identification and evaluation of the subtle counterproductive interactions between the WLANs MAC layer and the transport layer, this paper shows a new approach towards congestion control for WLANs. This paper also introduces a specialization of TFRC (MTFRC: Mobile TFRC), which is adapted to wireless access networks. This TFRC specialization requires only slight changes to the standard TFRC protocol. Simulation results show substantial improvements for applications over TFRC in scenarios where the bottleneck situates on the MAC layer of the mobile nodes.
