一种提高异构网络传输性能的双向流量控制机制

针对异构网络存在的高误码率和不对称带宽等特点使TCP性能降低的问题,本文提出了一种双向流量控制机制BFC,它根据数据链路的双向通信状况, 在前后向两个信道进行流量控制.在前向信道,我们设计了一种显式的ACK详细指示方法,协调多层控制机制及时调节流量;在后向信道,提出了一个ACK流量控制算法,根据双向拥塞状况,对ACK流进行自适应地控制.实验表明,该机制可以有效地提高异构网络传输性能,尤其是当双向信道的不对称参数较高的情况下,该方法显示出独特的优势.     

An Adaptive Delayed Acknowledgment Strategy to Improve TCP Performance in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

In multi-hop wireless networks, transmission control protocol (TCP) suffers from performance deterioration due to poor wireless channel characteristics. Earlier studies have shown that the small TCP acknowledgments consume as much wireless resources as the long TCP data packets. Moreover, generating an acknowledgment (ACK) for each incoming data packet reduces the performance of TCP. The main factor affecting TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks is the contention and collision between ACK and data packets that share the same path. Thus, lowering the number of ACKs using the delayed acknowledgment option defined in IETF RFC 1122 will improve TCP performance. However, large cumulative ACKs will induce packet loss due to retransmission time-out at the sender side of TCP. Motivated by this understanding, we propose a new TCP receiver with an adaptive delayed ACK strategy to improve TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks. Extensive simulations have been done to prove and evaluate our strategy over different topologies. The simulation results demonstrate that our strategy can improve TCP performance significantly.     

A Smart TCP Acknowledgment Approach for Multihop Wireless Networks

Reliable data transfer is one of the most difficult tasks to be accomplished in multihop wireless networks. Traditional transport protocols like TCP face severe performance degradation over multihop networks given the noisy nature of wireless media as well as unstable connectivity conditions in place. The success of TCP in wired networks motivates its extension to wireless networks. A crucial challenge faced by TCP over these networks is how to operate smoothly with the 802.11 wireless MAC protocol which also implements a retransmission mechanism at link level in addition to short RTS/CTS control frames for avoiding collisions. These features render TCP acknowledgments (ACK) transmission quite costly. Data and ACK packets cause similar medium access overheads despite the much smaller size of the ACKs. In this paper, we further evaluate our dynamic adaptive strategy for reducing ACK-induced overhead and consequent collisions. Our approach resembles the sender side's congestion control. The receiver is self-adaptive by delaying more ACKs under nonconstrained channels and less otherwise. This improves not only throughput but also power consumption. Simulation evaluations exhibit significant improvement in several scenarios     

基于模糊逻辑的无线网络流量自适应控制

文章在分析现有提高无线TCP性能方案的基础上，提出一种新的流量控制方法，即基于显式窗口反馈的无线网络流量控制方案。在Snoop中引入有线网络的显示窗口自适应（EWA）算法，通过对BS共享缓存的实时监测，应用模糊控制算法预测当前拥塞窗口（cwnd）的大小，并显式反馈给发送端，使TCP的发送窗口能快速响应网络负荷状况的变化．避免分组的丢失。仿真结果表明．该方法增强了网络对拥塞的自适应性以及对无线信道差错的实时处理能力．提高了网络的吞吐量。     

A buffer management algorithm for improving up/down transmission congestion protocol fairness in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks

The fair allocation of the resources is an important issue in wireless local area network (WLAN) because all wireless nodes compete for the same wireless radio channel. When uplink and downlink transmission congestion protocol (TCP) flows coexist in WLAN, the network service is biased toward the uplink TCP flows, and the downlink TCP flows tend to starve. In this article, we investigate the special up/down TCP unfairness problem and point out that the direct cause is the uplink acknowledgement (ACK) packets occupy most buffer space of access point. We thus propose a buffer management algorithm to ensure the fairness among uplink and downlink TCP flows. In order to limit the greedy behavior of ACK packets, the proposed algorithm adjusts the maximum size of buffer allocated for the ACK packets. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed solution not only provides the fairness but also achieves 10–20% lower queue delay and higher network goodput than the other solutions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rate-adaptive snoop: a TCP enhancement scheme over rate-controlled lossy links

We study TCP performance over the wireless links deploying a wireless rate-control technique, whose link characteristics are identified by variable link rate and bursty transmission error. We present a TCP enhancement scheme, called rate-adaptive snoop (RA-Snoop). RA-Snoop caches TCP packets selectively based on the wireless channel condition and the cached packets are retransmitted locally over the wireless link in case corruption loss is detected. In addition, for effective adaptation to variable bandwidth, RA-Snoop calculates the window feedback based on the bandwidth-delay product estimation and the queue level, then conveys this feedback information on the receiver's advertised window field in the acknowledgements returning to TCP sources. We compare the performance of RA-Snoop with that of existing schemes in the aspect of goodput and fairness. Results from simulations reveal that RA-Snoop achieves significant improvements over the existing schemes for various traffic scenarios.     

Performance improvement of TCP in ad hoc networks by mitigating channel contention

In ad hoc networks, the spatial reuse property limits the number of packets which can be spatially transmitted over a path. In standard Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), however, a TCP sender keeps transmitting packets without taking into account this property. This causes heavy contention for the wireless channel, resulting in the performance degradation of TCP flows. Hence, two techniques have been proposed independently in order to reduce the contention. First, a TCP sender utilizes a congestion window limit (CWL), by considering the spatial reuse property. This prevents the TCP sender from transmitting more than CWL number of packets at one time. Second, a delayed ack (DA) strategy is exploited in order to mitigate the contention between the TCP ACK and DATA packets. Recently, although TCP‐DAA (Dynamic Adaptive Acknowledgment) attempts to utilize a CWL‐based DA strategy, TCP‐DAA overlooks a dynamic correlation between these two techniques. This paper, therefore, reveals the dynamic correlation and also proposes a protocol which not only reduces the frequency of the TCP ACK transmissions but also determines a CWL value dynamically, according to network conditions. Simulation studies show that our protocol performs the best in various scenarios, as compared to TCP‐DAA and standard TCP (such as TCP‐NewReno). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TCP Over the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC: Analysis and Simulation

High data rate wireless technologies are now becoming a reality, and have spurred the development of new applications that were previously hindered by the lack of capacity. In particular, it is now possible to stream high definition movies from a laptop to a sound system and flat screen television seamlessly. One of the key enablers of such applications is the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is designed to support bandwidth intensive applications in wireless personal area networks (WPANs). A key observation is that a significant number of multi-media applications rely on the transmission control protocol (TCP). Unfortunately, little works have conducted a thorough performance study of TCP over the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC. Moreover, the IEEE 802.15.3 specification does not specify any strategies for allocating time slots. This paper therefore contributes to the current state-of-the-art in the following manners. From our extensive analytical and simulation studies, we reveal the impacts of different channel time allocation methods and acknowledgment policies on the performance of TCP, with particular attention on round trip time, congestion window growth, and packet recovery. We then present the following guidance to application developers: (1) channel time allocations (CTAs) should be distributed evenly over the superframe and have durations determined by TCP’s maximum congestion window, (2) CTA positioning has no impact on TCP’s performance, and (3) the specified delayed acknowledgment policy needs to be augmented with an adaptive algorithm that adjusts its burst size dynamically to varying bit error rate (BER).     

Using TCP rate control for queue input‐output rate matching

In explicit TCP rate control, the receiver's advertised window size in acknowledgment (ACK) packets can be modified by intermediate network elements to reflect network congestion conditions. The TCP receiver's advertised window (i.e. the receive buffer of a TCP connection) limits the maximum window and consequently the throughput that can be achieved by the sender. Appropriate reduction of the advertised window can control the number of packets allowed to be sent from a TCP source. This paper evaluates the performance of a TCP rate control scheme in which the receiver's advertised window size in ACK packets are modified in a network node in order to match the generated load to the assigned bandwidth in the node. Using simulation and performance metrics such as the packet loss rates and the cumulative number of TCP timeouts, we examine the service improvement provided by the TCP rate control scheme to the users. The modified advertised windows computed in the network elements and the link utilization are also examined. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DTPA: A Reliable Datagram Transport Protocol over Ad Hoc Networks

As a prevalent reliable transport protocol in the Internet, TCP uses two key functions: AIMD (Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease) congestion control and cumulative ACK technique to guarantee delivery. However, with these two functions, TCP becomes lowly efficient in ad hoc networks that have a much lower BDP and frequent packet losses due to various reasons, since TCP adjusts its transmission window based on packet losses. In this paper, we present that, provided that the BDP is very small, any AIMD-style congestion control is costly and hence not necessary for ad hoc networks. On the contrary, a technique to guarantee reliable transmission and to recover packet losses plays a more critical role in the design of a transport protocol over ad hoc networks. With this basis, we propose a novel and effective datagram-oriented end-to-end reliable transport protocol for ad hoc networks, which we call DTPA. The proposed scheme incorporates a fixed-size window based flow control and a cumulative bit-vector based selective ACK strategy. A mathematical model is developed to evaluate the performance of DTPA and to determine the optimum transmission window used in DTPA. The protocol is verified using GloMoSim. The simulation results show that our proposal substantially improves the network performance.     

Performance evaluation of TCP algorithms in multi‐hop wireless packet networks

Wireless packet ad hoc networks are characterized by multi‐hop wireless connectivity and limited bandwidth competed among neighboring nodes. In this paper, we investigate and evaluate the performance of several prevalent TCP algorithms in this kind of network over the wireless LAN standard IEEE 802.11 MAC layer. After extensively comparing the existing TCP versions (including Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, Sack and Vegas) in simulations, we show that, in most cases, the Vegas version works best. We reveal the reason why other TCP versions perform worse than Vegas and show a method to avoid this by tuning a TCP parameter— maximum window size. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of these TCP algorithms when they run with the delayed acknowledgment (DA) option defined in IETF RFC 1122, which allows the TCP receiver to transmit an ACK for every two incoming packets. We show that the TCP connection can gain 15 to 32 per cent good‐put improvement by using the DA option. For all the TCP versions investigated in this work, the simulation results show that with the maximum window size set at approximately 4, TCP connections perform best and then all these TCP variants differ little in performance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimizing Web delivery over wireless links: design, implementation, and experiences

World over wide-area wireless Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) networks have been upgraded to support the general packet radio service (GPRS). GPRS brings "always-on" wireless data connectivity at bandwidths comparable to that of conventional fixed-line telephone modems. Unfortunately many users have found the reality to be rather different, experiencing very disappointing performance when, for example, browsing the Web over GPRS. In This work, we show what causes the web and its underlying transport protocol TCP to underperform in a GPRS wide-area wireless environment. We examine why certain GPRS network characteristics interact badly with TCP to yield problems such as: link underutilization for short-lived flows, excess queueing for long-lived flows, ACK compression, poor loss recovery, and gross unfairness between competing flows. We also show that many Web browsers tend to be overly aggressive, and by opening too many simultaneous TCP connections can aggravate matters. We present the design and implementation of a web optimizing proxy system called GPRSWeb that mitigates many of the GPRS link-related performance problems with a simple software update to a mobile device. The update is a link-aware middleware (a local "client proxy") that sits in the mobile device, and communicates with a "server proxy" located at the other end of the wireless link, close to the wired-wireless border. The dual-proxy architecture collectively implements a number of key enhancements-an aggressive caching scheme that employs content-based hash keying to improve hit rates for dynamic content, a preemptive push of Web page support resources to mobile clients, resource adaptation to suit client capabilities, delta encoded data transfer of modified pages, DNS lookup migration, and a UDP-based reliable transport protocol that is specifically optimized for use over GPRS. We show that these enhancements results in significant improvement in web performance over GPRS links.     

A Channel Adaptive ACK Mechanism in High Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks

In IEEE 802.15.3 wireless personal area networks, the acknowledgement (ACK) mechanism has significant impact on the overall throughput. In this paper, we propose a channel adaptive ACK (CA-ACK) mechanism where an ACK is selectively transmitted depending on wireless channel conditions to maximize the data throughput. Specifically, an ACK is transmitted only when the frame error rate is greater than a pre-defined threshold; this threshold is derived for a given payload size and data rate using developed analytical models. Simulation results demonstrate that CA-ACK improves the throughput adaptively to varying channel conditions.     

TCP-H：基于三重判决的TCP拥塞控制

在异构无线网络中存在高误码、切换、信号衰落等链路特性,使传统的TCP拥塞控制机制受到了挑战。在不增加开销的情况下,基于丢包检测、RTT时间和ACK返回速率三重判决,提出了一种新的TCP拥塞控制机制（TCP—H）。仿真结果表明,TCP—H增强了对拥塞和随机差错的区分能力,满足公平性要求,改进的最小RTT计算方法解决了在低延迟向高延迟网络切换的时Vegas,Westwood等算法存在的最小RTT更新问题,有效提高了在异构无鲅网络环埔下TCP的性能．     

Modeling TCP SACK performance over wireless channels with semi-reliable ARQ/FEC

Providing reliable data communications over wireless channels is a challenging task because time-varying wireless channel characteristics often lead to bit errors. These errors result in loss of IP packets and, consequently, TCP segments encapsulated into these packets. Since TCP cannot distinguish packet losses due to bit corruption from those due to network congestion, any packet loss caused by wireless channel impairments leads to unnecessary execution of the TCP congestion control algorithms and, hence, sub-optimal performance. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) try to improve communication reliability and reduce packet losses by detecting and recovering corrupted bits. Most analytical models that studied the effect of ARQ and FEC on TCP performance assumed that the ARQ scheme is perfectly persistent (i.e., completely reliable), thus a frame is always successfully transmitted irrespective of the number of transmission attempts it takes. In this paper, we develop an analytical cross-layer model for a TCP connection running over a wireless channel with a semi-reliable ARQ scheme, where the amount of transmission attempts is limited by some number. The model allows to evaluate the joint effect of stochastic properties of the wireless channel characteristics and various implementation-specific parameters on TCP performance, which makes it suitable for performance optimization studies. The input parameters include the bit error rate, the value of the normalized autocorrelation function of bit error observations at lag 1, the strength of the FEC code, the persistency of ARQ, the size of protocol data units at different layers, the raw data rate of the wireless channel, and the bottleneck link buffer size.     

Empirical evaluation of receiver‐based TCP delay control in CDMA2000 networks

Wide‐area broadband wireless technologies such as CDMA2000 often suffer from variable transfer rate and long latency. In particular, TCP window‐based rate control causes excessive buffering at the base station because of the lower transfer rate of the wireless link than that of the wired backhaul link. This performance characteristic of TCP further increases the end‐to‐end delay, and additional resources are required at the base station. This paper presents a practical mechanism to control the end‐to‐end TCP delay for CDMA2000 networks (or other similar wireless technologies). The key idea is to reduce and stabilize RTT (round‐trip time) by dynamically controlling the TCP advertised window size, based on a runtime measurement of the wireless channel condition at the mobile station. The proposed system has been implemented by modifying the Linux protocol stack. The experiment results, conducted on a commercial CDMA2000 1x network, show that the proposed scheme greatly reduces the TCP delay in non‐congested networks, while not sacrificing the TCP throughput in congested networks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficient resource allocation for China's 3G/4G wireless networks

The all-IP DiffServ model is expected to be the most promising architecture for QoS provisioning in China's next-generation wireless networks, due to its scalability, convenience for mobility support, and capability of interworking heterogeneous radio access networks. This article focuses on efficient resource allocation in a wireless DiffServ architecture. Resource utilization efficiency is particularly important for China's wireless networks as the mobile user density in China is and will continue to be much higher than that in other countries. More specifically, we propose a novel buffer sharing scheme to provide assured service for real-time layer-coded multimedia traffic, which can guarantee the specific packet loss requirement of each layer with UDP as the transport layer protocol. An adaptive optimal buffer configuration can be applied to achieve maximum resource utilization over the time-varying channel. Assured service is also provided to TCP data traffic for guaranteed throughput, where the cross-layer coupling between the TCP layer and link layer is exploited to efficiently utilize the wireless resources.     

Fair and efficient Transmission Control Protocol access in the IEEE 802.11 infrastructure basic service set

When the stations in an IEEE 802.11 infrastructure basic service set employ Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), this exacerbates per‐flow unfair access problem. We propose a novel analytical model to approximately calculate the maximum per‐flow TCP congestion window limit that prevents packet losses at the access point buffer and therefore provides fair TCP access both in the downlink and uplink. The proposed analysis is unique in considering the effects of varying number of uplink and downlink TCP flows, differing round trip times among TCP connections and the use of delayed TCP acknowledgment (ACK) mechanism. Motivated by the findings of this theoretical analysis and simulations, we design a link layer access control block to be employed only at the access point in order to resolve the unfair access problem. The proposed link layer access control block uses congestion control and ACK filtering approach by prioritizing the access of TCP data packets of downlink flows over TCP ACK packets of uplink flows. Via simulations, we show that the proposed algorithm can provide both short‐term and long‐term fair accesses while improving channel utilization and access delay. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhancing Fairness and Throughput of TCP in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Most of the recent research on TCP over heterogeneous wireless networks has concentrated on differentiating between packet drops caused by congestion and link errors, to avoid significant throughput degradations due to the TCP sending window being frequently shut down, in response to packet losses caused not by congestion but by transmission errors over wireless links. However, TCP also exhibits inherent unfairness toward connections with long round-trip times or traversing multiple congested routers. This problem is aggravated by the difference of bit-error rates between wired and wireless links in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we apply the TCP Bandwidth Allocation (TBA) algorithm, which we have proposed previously, to improve TCP fairness over heterogeneous wireless networks with combined wireless and wireline links. To inform the sender when congestion occurs, we propose to apply Wireless Explicit Congestion Notification (WECN). By controlling the TCP window behavior with TBA and WECN, congestion control and error-loss recovery are effectively separated. Further enhancement is also incorporated to smooth traffic bursts. Simulation results show that not only can the combined TBA and WECN mechanism improve TCP fairness, but it can maintain good throughput performance in the presence of wireless losses as well. A salient feature of TBA is that its main functions are implemented in the access node, thus simplifying the sender-side implementation.     

Explicit window adaptation: a method to enhance TCP performance

We study the performance of TCP in an internetwork consisting of both rate-controlled and nonrate-controlled segments. A common example of such an environment occurs when the end systems are part of IP datagram networks interconnected by a rate-controlled segment, such as an ATM network using the available bit rate (ABR) service. In the absence of congestive losses in either segment, TCP keeps increasing its window to its maximum size. Mismatch between the TCP window and the bandwidth-delay product of the network results in accumulation of large queues and possibly buffer overflows in the devices at the edges of the rate-controlled segment, causing degraded throughput and unfairness. We develop an explicit feedback scheme, called explicit window adaptation, based on modifying the receiver's advertised window in TCP acknowledgments returning to the source. The window size indicated to TCP is a function of the free buffer in the edge device. Results from simulations with a wide range of traffic scenarios show that this explicit window adaptation scheme can control the buffer occupancy efficiently at the edge device, and results in significant improvements in packet loss rate, fairness, and throughput over a packet discard policy such as random early detection (RED)