Improving TCP fairness and performance with bulk transmission control over lossy wireless channel

Abstract

The traditional windows-based TCP congestion control mechanism produces throughput bias against flows with longer packet roundtrip times; the flow with a short packet roundtrip time preoccupies the shared network bandwidth to a greater extent than others. Moreover, the blind window reduction that occurs whenever packets are lost decreases the network utilization severely, especially in networks with high packet losses. This paper proposes a sender-based TCP congestion control, called TCP-BT. The scheme estimates the network bandwidth depending on the transmission behavior of applications, and adjusts the congestion window by considering both the estimated network bandwidth and the packet roundtrip time to improve fairness as well as transmission performance. The scheme has been implemented in the Linux platform and compared with various TCP variants in real environments. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves transmission performance, especially in networks with congestion and/or high packet loss rates. Experiments in real commercial wireless networks have also been conducted to support the practical use of the proposed mechanism.