TCP fairness issues in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

In this paper, we study several TCP fairness issues in wireless local networks, both experimentally and via simulation. We illustrate the unfairness problems caused by the 802.11 MAC protocol, as well as by cross-layer interactions. Two possible solutions, namely SPM-AF queue management and LAS queue management, are proposed in the paper. These two queue management approaches are designed to alleviate the unfairness among competing TCP flows. The evaluation of these approaches uses the ns-2 network simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed approaches provide better sharing of the limited wireless network bandwidth among TCP flows.