A Performance Comparison Study of End-to-End Congestion Control Protocols over MIMO Fading Channels

We study the performance of end-to-end congestion control protocols, namely, VCP and TCP/AQM+ECN over wireless topologies created by MIMO fading channel links. We model the loss characteristic of such links with finite-state Markov chains the parameters of which can be derived from the fading channel specifications. We also investigate the effects of utilizing forward error correction (FEC) techniques at the link layer in order to improve the performance of the above congestion control protocols. Our numerical results are generated utilizing NS2 discrete-event simulator. Our results show that without using link layer FEC techniques, the performance of both VCP and TCP/AQM+ECN in wireless networks can be significantly degraded. Further, they show that the use of MIMO links can significantly improve the performance of the protocols of our study