PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF PRIORITIZED TCP ACK SCHEMES IN THE IEEE 802.11e WLANs
Aruna Thangaraj · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2007
With the advent of multimedia applications over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), the IEEE 802.11e standard was proposed to incorporate Quality of Service (QoS) parameters in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer.It has been found through previous research work that the throughput of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is less when compared to that of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in the IEEE 802.11eMAC layer protocol.This is because the TCP ACK (Acknowledgement) packets are queued up at the Access Points (APs), as the TCP ACK packets are not prioritized.In this research work, the performance of TCP traffic in the IEEE 802.11eMAC layer protocol is evaluated and two TCP ACK prioritizing schemes are proposed.The proposed schemes improve the overall throughput of TCP in the IEEE 802.11eMAC layer protocol while maintaining the QoS requirements of the IEEE 802.11eMAC layer protocol.We also analyze the problem of starvation of lower priority traffic in the IEEE 802.11eMAC layer protocol and its effects on the performance of lower priority TCP traffic in particular.The proposed second scheme of TCP ACK prioritization aims at improving the throughput of the lower priority TCP traffic in particular under heavy network load while maintaining the QoS requirements of the higher priority traffic.The schemes have been verified through extensive simulation results.