Coupled IEEE 802.11ac and TCP Goodput improvement using Aggregation and Reverse Direction

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model leveraging IEEE 802.11ac features, especially Reverse Direction and aggregation, to significantly enhance TCP goodput in home environments, with improvements up to 60% in error-prone channels.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for TCP over IEEE 802.11ac that utilizes Reverse Direction and aggregation to improve goodput, especially in error-prone conditions.

Findings

Reverse Direction improves TCP goodput by 20-60%.

Aggregation and ARQ protocols enhance performance in error-prone channels.

Model is effective for single TCP connection in home environments.

Abstract

This paper suggests a new model for the transmission of TCP traffic over IEEE 802.11 using the new features of IEEE 802.11ac . The paper examines a first step in this direction and as such we first consider a single TCP connection, which is typical in a home environment. We show that when the IEEE 802.11ac MAC is aware of QoS TCP traffic, using Reverse Direction improves the TCP Goodput in tens of percentages compared to the traditional contention based channel access. In an error-free channel this improvement is 20% while in an error-prone channel the improvement reaches 60%, also using blind retransmission of frames. In our operation modes we also assume the use in Two-Level aggregation scheme, the ARQ protocol of the IEEE 802.11ac MAC layer and also assume the data rates and the four Access Categories defined in this standard.