Analysis and enhancement of TCP performance over an IEEE 802.11 multi-hop wireless network: single session case

It is well known that the IEEE 802.11 does not perform well in multihop wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we focus on a simple static string topology multihop wireless network. We are mainly concerned with the throughput of one large file transfer being performed from the first node to the last node of this network. First, we obtain bounds on the session throughput. We compare the performance of TCP with the throughput bound obtained and find a huge gap. We then propose a modification to the current IEEE 802.11 protocol, which is based on tuning the back-off mechanism of IEEE 802.11. Simulations show that the proposed mechanism improves the performance of a session by almost 100%.