Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802.11e Wireless Networks With TCP ACK Prioritization

With the advent of multimedia applications over wireless local area networks (WLANs), the IEEE 802.11e standard was proposed to incorporate quality of service (QoS) parameters in the medium access control (MAC) layer. It has been found through previous research work that the throughput of transport control protocol (TCP) is less when compared to that of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in the IEEE 802.11e. This is because the TCP ACK (acknowledgement) packets are queued up at the access points (APs), as the TCP ACK packets are not prioritized. In this paper, we explore the performance of TCP traffic and also propose a new prioritized TCP ACK scheme. The proposed scheme improves the overall throughput of TCP in the IEEE 802.11e while maintaining the QoS requirements of the IEEE 802.11e. The scheme has been verified through simulation.