Improving TCP Performance for EAST Experimental Data in the Wireless LANs

TCP is the most commonly used transport control protocol. However, its throughput and fairness performance degrades in WLANs due to the unfairness in 802.11 MAC protocol. Since more and more scientists at the EAST facility in China are relying on such set up to download and analyze their experimental data, their research productivity is severely hampered. In this paper, we propose to use a dynamical mechanism, called the AP-DDA, at the Access Point to tackle these problems. Our mechanism can decrease the number of ACKs, which in turn reduce the interference between the TCP data packets and the ACK packets, and therefore improve the channel utilization. Furthermore, fairness is enhanced by a buffer management method in addition to our delayed ACKs mechanism. Both simulation and experimental results under various scenarios show that our mechanism can have better performance than conventional methods in wireless local area networks.