Performance enhancement of TCP over adaptive multi-rate IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

This paper presents a new TCP window size adjustment scheme for the automatic rate fallback (ARF) algorithm. The proposed scheme utilizes the information about radio usage monitored on the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer. Each station calculates the maximum available window size on each long-lived connection based on these information when the data transmission / reception rate is switched, and limits the maximum sending window size. The performance of the proposed scheme is investigated and compared with that of standard TCP through several simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances the transmission efficiency of TCP.