Basestation Flow Control

Bandwidth on wireless links keeps increasing, but the bandwidth on wired links keeps increasing too. Therefore, the discrepancy in bandwidth between wireless and wired links still persists, and will certainly persist. Such discrepancy causes the wireless link to likely remain the bottleneck for data transfers from wired networks to a wireless destination, As a bottleneck, the basestation may experience congestion losses that can adversely impact TCP performance. We propose a technique that alleviates substantially the congestion at the base station and enforces fairness among the TCP connections that are sharing the wireless link. Our technique does not require any change at the TCP sender or the TCP receiver. We evaluate our technique using simulations with ns-2. Preliminary results yield almost a null congestion loss rate, a decrease in average queue length, an increase in the throughput. Fairness is very well enforced.