BBRp: Improving TCP BBR Performance Over WLAN

This paper shows the inefficiency of TCP BBR in exploiting the Wi-Fi bandwidth. This limitation of BBR has been observed with both IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac, where the mechanism of frame aggregation is used to boost the throughput of data transmission. In the last years, many TCP variants have been introduced to limit the bufferbloat phenomena and bound the latency through a reduction of the queue backlog injection rate. However, this mechanism impacts on the Wi-Fi frame aggregation logic, impeding TCP congestion controls to reach the full throughput potential of a Wi-Fi interface. While this problem can be solved with TCP Cubic by allowing the sender node to enqueue more packets, for TCP BBR the fix is not the same, as it has a customized pacing algorithm. With this contribution we propose BBRp, a new BBR version that allows for fine-tuning the congestion control pace, achieving between four and six times more throughput over IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac channels, at the cost of an increased latency that is however always less than the latency obtainable with loss-based TCP congestion controls.