Dual queue management for improving TCP performance in multi-rate infrastructure WLANs

In IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), TCP suffers unfairness between uplink and downlink flows due to its asymmetric reactions towards data and ACK losses at the AP (Access Point), and the AP's inability to distinguish itself from other contending stations accessing the medium. In this paper, we propose a novel dual queue management (DQM) scheme with ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification) at the AP's downlink buffer to improve TCP performance in infrastructure WLANs. Our approach maintains two queues for TCP ACK and data respectively, with their total length controlled by a PI (Proportional Integral) controller to prevent congestion. ACK/data packets are marked/dequeued dependent on uplink/downlink time usage of the wireless channel. We also propose an opportunistic scheduling mechanism of the two queues exploiting "multi-rate capability" and "multi-user diversity" for more efficient link utilization. We evaluate the proposed approach in ns-2 and our simulation results demonstrate that this design with few states can significantly improve TCP congestion control, fairness performance and link utilization in WLANs.