Survey on TCP Fairness in Wireless Local Network
Wang Jian-xin · 2009
TCP fairness is an important issue in WLAN because the wireless channel is shared by all mobile stations.While the MAC protocol provides all the competing stations with equal opportunity for media access,it does not guarantee fair service provision at the transport layer.The greedy closed loop control nature of TCP congestion control,the long-term equal channel access probabilities guaranteed by MAC layer protocol,and the performance anomaly of wireless channel lead to the significant unfair bandwidth distribution between TCP flows.This paper attempted to address these TCP unfairness problems by first summarizing over several major reasons for such unfairness,an in-depth analysis and the detailed comparison between different solutions were proposed.Some new research directions for optimizing TCP fairness in WLAN were suggested.