Performance improvement of TCP with delayed ACKs in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

Abstract

We use a Markov renewal reward approach to analyse the throughput achieved by a TCP connection spanning a multi-hop wireless network that uses the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The significance of the paper is twofold: (a) the method used in the paper is simple and can be used for performance evaluation of wireless LANs in general, and, (b) the analytical results suggest that there can be a significant gain in TCP performance due to ACK thinning if the TCP receiver uses the delayed acknowledgement option of TCP. This is in accordance with other simulation based studies on similar lines.