Using traffic asymmetry to enhance TCP performance

Abstract

A wealth of recent work has gone into optimizing the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) on the downlink channel of wireless networks such as for example, honing its congestion awareness mechanism so that it is minimally affected by random wireless losses, and optimizing achieved fairness of the end-to-end TCP rates. Other work has gone into balancing the allocation of a shared resource between the downlink and uplink in order to optimize TCP performance. We build on such previous research by proposing a cross-layer algorithm for resource allocation in OFDMA systems aiming not only to achieve optimal throughput for competing TCP flows but also to allocate resources appropriately between the downlink and uplink. This is important due to the increasing number of Internet applications where the mobile terminal is the TCP sender (social networking, peer-to-peer, etc.). Therefore, our scheme makes use of the asymmetry in the traffic and by defining the boundary between downlink and uplink capacity dynamically, enhance the TCP performance. Through numerical investigations we show the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of achieved fairness to the receivers and efficient allocation of downlink to uplink ratios based on the TCP traffic.