Cross-Layer Enhancement to Support TCP-Based Traffics in WLANs

Widespread deployment of wireless local area networks and a gradual increase in streaming applications have brought about a demand for improved quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks. However, increasing user datagram protocol based high priority multimedia traffic and the class differentiation introduced in QoS protocols, has resulted into transmission control protocol (TCP) starvation and increased spurious timeouts. While today’s Internet traffic is still dominated by TCP based applications, the negative effects of IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF) scheme on TCP performance in the presence of high priority traffic have not been extensively explored. In this paper, the performance of TCP in 802.11e WLAN competing with high priority traffic is examined. The prioritised adaptive enhanced scheme (PAD_EDCF) is proposed. The proposed scheme gives priority to TCP control packets in order to improve the low traffic transmission flow and acquires additional capability of adjusting the MAC parameters based on the traffic load condition. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves TCP performances in terms of traffic efficiency, throughput and reduces delay.