Improving fairness among TCP flows crossing wireless ad hoc and wired networks

Abstract

In scenarios where wireless ad hoc networks are deployed, sometimes it would be desirable that ad hoc nodes can communicate with servers in wired networks to upload or download data. In these cases TCP connections will span both wireless ad hoc and wired domains. However, TCP often faces severe unfairness in this type of connection scenario, which forces some TCP flows to completely stop transferring any data despite all links being in good states. In this paper, we propose a simple scheduling scheme, which helps competing TCP connections to achieve fairness without much throughput loss. Simulation results show that our scheme successfully eliminates the extreme unfairness existing in above-mentioned scenarios.