Experimenting with τ-AIMD over wireless asynchronous networks

Abstract

The work describes the performance of two congestion control algorithms: AIMD and τ-AIMD. The first is the default mechanism of TCP; the second is a proposed congestion control algorithm that improves fairness of AIMD. We consider asynchronous networks where TCP flows have different propagation delays, a portion of their link is wireless, and they compete for resources over a single bottleneck link. We show that τ-AIMD improves the performance of flows that have long propagation delay and the fairness of the network. In wireless links τ-AIMD outperforms AIMD and the cost of lost packets (or wasted energy) is the same as that of AIMD.