Receiver-Assisted Congestion Control to Achieve High Throughput in Lossy Wireless Networks

Abstract

Many applications would require fast data transfer in high-speed wireless networks nowadays. However, due to its conservative congestion control algorithm, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) cannot effectively utilize the network capacity in lossy wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a receiver-assisted congestion control mechanism (RACC) in which the sender performs loss-based control, while the receiver is performing delay-based control. The receiver measures the network bandwidth based on the packet interarrival interval and uses it to compute a congestion window size deemed appropriate for the sender. After receiving the advertised value feedback from the receiver, the sender then uses the additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD) mechanism to compute the correct congestion window size to be used. By integrating the loss-based and the delay-based congestion controls, our mechanism can mitigate the effect of wireless losses, alleviate the timeout effect, and therefore make better use of network bandwidth. Simulation and experiment results in various scenarios show that our mechanism can outperform conventional TCP in high-speed and lossy wireless environments.