TCP Behavior on Multi-Gigabit IEEE 802.11ad Link

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11ad technology, which is a member of the IEEE 802.11 family, promisingly extends the operation of Wi-Fi networks to the unlicensed 60 GHz band. In such a case, the Wi-Fi network can support the throughput of multi-gigabit per second, potentially support various emerging applications. Since the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) plays a vital role in Wi-Fi networks, it is necessary to understand the TCP performance in that multi-Gbps condition. This paper investigates the performance of popular TCP variants on the IEEE 802.11ad wireless link. We conduct the experiments with TCP CUBIC, CDG, BBR, which are typically loss-based, delay-based, and model-based TCP congestion control algorithms, in different loss conditions. The results show that in a no-loss scenario, CUBIC and CDG keep good throughput at the cost of high TCP latency. Meanwhile, BBR has excellent performance even under the high loss scenario.