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Performance modelling and measurements of TCP transfer throughput in 802.11-based WLAN

Published: 07 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The growing popularity of the 802.11 standard for building local wireless networks has generated an extensive literature on the performance modelling of its MAC protocol. However, most of the available studies focus on the throughput analysis in saturation conditions, while very little has been done on investigating the interactions between the 802.11 MAC protocol and closed-loop transport protocols such as TCP. This paper addresses this issue by developing an analytical model to compute the stationary probability distribution of the number of backlogged nodes in a WLAN in the presence of persistent TCP-controlled download and upload data transfers, and embedding the network backlog distribution in the MAC protocol modelling. A large set of experiments conducted in a real network validates the model correctness for a wide range of configurations. A particular emphasis is devoted to investigate and explain the TCP fairness characteristics. Our analytical model and the supporting experimental outcomes demonstrate that using default settings for the capacity of devices' output queues provides a fair allocation of channel bandwidth to the TCP connections, independently of the number of downstream and upstream flows. Furthermore, we show that the TCP total throughput does not degrade by increasing the number of wireless stations.

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  • (2024)TCP Throughput Over Full-Duplex WLANs: Novel Implications of the AP's New CapabilityICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10623126(1041-1046)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
  • (2017)ATRAS: adaptive MAC protocol for efficient and fair coexistence between radio over fiber-based and CSMA/CA-based WLANsEURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking10.1186/s13638-017-0907-22017:1Online publication date: 19-Jul-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
MSWiM '06: Proceedings of the 9th ACM international symposium on Modeling analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
October 2006
406 pages
ISBN:1595934774
DOI:10.1145/1164717
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. 802.11 MAC protocol
  2. Markov chain
  3. TCP
  4. performance modelling
  5. traffic measurements

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MSWiM '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 160 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 1,577 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Novel Insights From a Cross-Layer Analysis of TCP and UDP Traffic Over Full-Duplex WLANsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.351009924:4(3288-3301)Online publication date: Apr-2025
  • (2024)TCP Throughput Over Full-Duplex WLANs: Novel Implications of the AP's New CapabilityICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10623126(1041-1046)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
  • (2017)ATRAS: adaptive MAC protocol for efficient and fair coexistence between radio over fiber-based and CSMA/CA-based WLANsEURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking10.1186/s13638-017-0907-22017:1Online publication date: 19-Jul-2017
  • (2012)State Dependent Attempt Rate modeling of single cell IEEE 802.11 WLANs with homogeneous nodes and Poisson packet arrivalsPerformance Evaluation10.1016/j.peva.2012.05.00469:9(413-439)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2012
  • (2012)Short communicationPerformance Evaluation10.1016/j.peva.2012.02.00469:6(289-296)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
  • (2011)Modeling the effect of transmission errors on TCP controlled transfers over infrastructure 802.11 wireless LANsProceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems10.1145/2068897.2068946(275-284)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2011
  • (2011)TCP performance optimization in multi-cell WLANsPerformance Evaluation10.1016/j.peva.2011.04.00268:9(806-824)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2011
  • (2010)Experimental validation of analytical performance models for IEEE 802.11 networksProceedings of the 2nd international conference on COMmunication systems and NETworks10.5555/1831443.1831506(498-505)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2010
  • (2010)Analytical models for energy consumption in infrastructure WLAN STAs carrying TCP trafficProceedings of the 2nd international conference on COMmunication systems and NETworks10.5555/1831443.1831445(10-19)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2010
  • (2010)Analytical models for energy consumption in infrastructure WLAN STAs carrying TCP traffic2010 Second International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworks (COMSNETS 2010)10.1109/COMSNETS.2010.5432010(1-10)Online publication date: Jan-2010
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