An Improvement of TCP Throughput Fairness Control Method for Concurrent Communications in Elastic WLAN System

Abstract

Nowadays, IEEE802.11n wireless local-area network (WLAN) has gained significant popularities for the Internet access. In WLAN, when multiple hosts are concurrently communicating with a single access-point (AP), the TCP throughput unfairness appears among them. Previously, we have proposed the TCP fairness control method to solve this problem by introducing delays at the packet transmissions from the AP to the faster hosts, to give more transmission opportunities to the slowest host. However, iperf is adopted to measure the throughput, which becomes the bottleneck since the client software must be installed at every host. In this paper, we propose an improvement of this method by adopting iftop, which allows estimating the throughput by monitoring the transmitted/received packets at the AP. The effectiveness of our proposal is confirmed through experiments using the elastic WLAN system testbed with one AP and two hosts