Enhancing TCP fairness in ad hoc wireless networks using neighborhood RED

Significant TCP unfairness in ad hoc wireless networks has been reported during the past several years. This unfairness results from the nature of the shared wireless medium and location dependency. If we view a node and its interfering nodes to form a “neighborhood”, the aggregate of local queues at these nodes represents the distributed queue for this neighborhood. However, this queue is not a FIFO queue. Flows sharing the queue have different, dynamically changing priorities determined by the topology and traffic patterns. Thus, they get different feedback in terms of packet loss rate and packet delay when congestion occurs. In wired networks, the Randomly Early Detection (RED) scheme was found to improve TCP fairness. In this paper, we show that the RED scheme does not work when running on individual queues in wireless nodes. We then propose a Neighborhood RED (NRED) scheme, which extends the RED concept to the distributed neighborhood queue. Simulation studies confirm th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Kaixin Xu, Mario Gerla, Lantao Qi, Yantai Shu
• Keywords: Ad Hoc, MOBICOM 2003, Significant TCP Unfairness, TCP Unfairness