Extended Queue Management Backward Congestion Control Algorithms for Web Transfers in Wireless Environment

Abstract

Wireless links are characterized by high error rates and intermittent connectivity. TCP congestion control has been developed on the assumption that network congestion is the only cause for packet loss. Upon detecting a packet loss, TCP drops its transmit window resulting in an unnecessary reduction of end-to-end throughput which results in suboptimal performance.The sender has to be made aware by some feedback mechanism that some of the losses reported are not due to congestion. The Active Queue Management algorithms (AQM) are used to reduce congestion, and in this paper, we have analysed four AQM algorithms, Random Early Deduction (RED), Wireless Explicit Congestion Notification (WECN), Queue Management Backward Congestion Control Algorithm (QMBCCA) and its enhanced version Extended Queue Management Backward Congestion Control Algorithm (EQMBCCA). WECN, QMBCCA & EQMBCCA algorithms make use of feedback mechanisms. WECN gives feedback using the CE bit. QMBCCA and EQMBCCA make use of ISQ notifications and also the CE bit whenever the average queue size crosses minimum threshold value. EQMBCCA reduces the reverse ISQ traffic by introducing a configurable intermediate threshold value IntThres. The comparison is made in terms of Delay, HTTP packet loss percentage and fairness for FTP flows in a wireless environment. It is found that the performance of EQMBCCA is almost equal to that of QMBCCA and better than RED and WECN.