A cross-layer congestion and contention window control scheme for TCP performance improvement in wireless LANs

Neither the current TCP protocol nor the standard backoff algorithm of IEEE 802.11 protocol is able to distinguish corruption loss from congestion or collision loss. Hence, high transmission errors and a varying latency inherent in wireless channel would have a seriously adverse effect on the performance of TCP. In this paper, we propose a novel and pragmatic cross-layer approach with joint congestion and contention window control scheme to improve the performance of TCP in IEEE 802.11 wireless environments. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme. As it turns out, our design indeed provides a more efficient solution for frequent transmission loss and enables TCP to distinguish between congestion loses and transmission errors, thus to take proper remedial actions.