Improvement of an ACK returning method of TCP proxies in network environment with wireless LANs

Abstract

In a network environment including a wireless LAN and a wired network, split-connection type proxies have been proposed to improve TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) throughput. A proxy is placed at the boundary between a wireless LAN and a wired network, and it splits a TCP connection which is established between a host (WSTA) in a wireless LAN and a host (STA) in a wired network into two virtual TCP connections. We have proposed a split-connection proxy called DA-Proxy, and simulation results in our previous works show that although the DA-Proxy can increase throughput of downflows (flows from STAs to WSTAs), throughput of upflows (flows from WSTAs to STAs) is not improved and is almost the same as that of upflows without the proxy. In this paper, we propose a new proxy called MDA-Proxy which tries to increase throughput of upflows by decreasing the number of ACKs in a WLAN and show its effectiveness using simulation results.