Congestion Control in Wi-Fi Networks—State of the Art, Performance Evaluation, and Key Research Directions

This paper focuses on congestion control in the particular context of wireless networks. It summarizes basic concepts and key performance metrics pertaining to congestion control and surveys relevant and recent congestion control schemes that are currently used by most popular applications and services on the Internet. The paper also identifies the unique challenges brought to the congestion control problem when running on wireless environments. It then presents an in-depth and exhaustive performance evaluation and comparison of five of the most widely used congestion control schemes when running on wireless networks for different scenarios with low and high interference. The outcome of the conducted evaluation clearly shows the different performances incurred by the studied congestion control schemes and the impact of the characteristics of wireless environments on the key performance metrics. It also provides some insights on which congestion control scheme should be used depending on the application’s requirements. The paper concludes by highlighting the open research directions to advance congestion control schemes to bitter fit the challenges faced in wireless networks and emergent applications.