A Comparison of Congestion Control Algorithms in Emulated Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

Wi-Fi technology has become popular in our lives with various Wi-Fi capable products such as laptops, mobile phones, etc. Moreover, in Wi-Fi networks, a device communicates typically with a server using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for most applications. In such a context, the behavior of the TCP congestion control primarily affects network performance. Hence, it is essential to determine and select an appropriate TCP congestion control that fits different network conditions. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation of TCP congestion control algorithms in an emulated Wi-Fi network. More specifically, we investigate 14 TCP congestion control algorithms in the Wi-Fi network, considering the variation of queue size and packet loss. The evaluation results of Round Trip Time (RTT) and achieved throughput allows us to compare the TCP congestion control algorithms. In our investigation, the Bottleneck Bandwidth Roundtrip-Time algorithm (BBR) has the best performance.