Modeling and analysis of TCP dynamics over IEEE 802.11 WLAN

Abstract

Today, IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is a prevailing solution for the wireless Internet access while transport control protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in the Internet. It is known that, in the infrastructure WLAN with multiple long-lived TCP flow stations, the actual number of contending TCP stations is limited to a small number, and the aggregated TCP throughput is basically independent of the total number of TCP stations. It is due to the behavior of the TCP flow control in the infrastructure WLAN, where the downlink (i.e., access point-to-stations) is the bottleneck link. In this paper, we develop an accurate and realistic analytical model of long-lived TCP over WLAN based on a well-known p-persistent model of the 802.11. We calculate the average number of the active TCP stations as well as the aggregated TCP throughput using our model for a given number of TCP stations and the maximum TCP receive window size. We verify our model via ns-2 simulations. Moreover, we find from our work that the minimum contention window sizes of the standards (i.e., 31 and 15 for IEEE 802.11b and 802.11a, respectively) are not optimal in the sense of the TCP throughput maximization