Improving TCP Performance in IEEE 802.11 Networks

摘要

With growing number of wireless devices in the field, the main and sometime the only way to access the Internet is wireless networks based on IEEE 802.11 standard. In most cases these wireless Internet access links are bottlenecks. A fair and efficient utilization of these links is becoming more complicated and to deal with that have higher layer protocols. Today the main such protocol is transport control protocol (TCP). However, due to big protocol overhead of IEEE 802.11 and TCP, performance degradation of the wireless link utilization is observed. In this paper the acknowledgment frames (ACKs) filtering solution for reducing TCP protocol overhead in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks is presented. The results of performed experiments not only show the increase of TCP throughput but also the reduce of the wireless network saturation without any considerable influence to TCP functionality.