Eun-Chan Park

WLC47-4: Analysis of Unfairness between TCP Uplink and Downlink Flows in Wi-Fi Hot Spots

This paper focuses on the unfairness problem between TCP uplink and downlink flows in the 802.11 Wi-Fi hot spots and shows that the service is prone to be unfair. The cause of unfairness is analyzed from two aspects: TCP-induced asymmetry and MAC-induced asymmetry. Due to the asymmetric behavior of TCP congestion control with a cumulative acknowledgment mechanism between uplink and downlink flows, the service is biased toward the uplink flow and the downlink flow tends to starve. The contention-based channel access mechanism of 802.11 MAC exacerbates this unfairness problem because it intends to provide fair access opportunity only to the sending stations. Next, the analysis of the interaction between congestion control of TCP and contention control of MAC reveals interesting and counter-intuitive results: (i) Even when a station has a sufficiently large amount of traffic to send, it does not always participate in the MAC-layer contention, its opportunity for MAC-layer contention is controlled by the TCP congestion control, (ii) The aggregate throughput remains almost constant with respect to the number of stations sending/receiving TCP traffic. (Hi) Both TCP-induced unfairness and MAC-induced unfairness can be resolved if packet loss due to buffer overflow in an access point does not occur.

Feedback-Based Adaptive Packet Marking for Proportional Bandwidth Allocation

Differentiated service (DiffServ) networks have been proposed to assure the achievable minimum bandwidth to aggregate flows. However, analyses in the literature show that the current DiffServ networks are biased in favor of ah aggregate flow that has a smaller committed information rate (CIR) when aggregate flows with different CIRs share a bottleneck link. In order to mitigate this unfairness problem, we propose an adaptive marking scheme which provides the relative bandwidth assurance in proportion to the CIRs of the aggregates. By introducing a virtual target rate (VTR) and adjusting it depending on the provision level of the network, each aggregate can obtain its fair share of the bandwidth, regardless of traffic load. This scheme is based on a feedback approach. It utilizes only two-bit feedback information conveyed in the packet header and can be implemented in a distributed manner. Furthermore, the proposed scheme does not require calculating fair shares of aggregates or any additional signaling protocol. Using steady state analysis and extensive simulations, we show that the scheme can provide aggregate flows with their fair shares of bandwidth, which is proportional to the CIRs, under various network conditions

A Token-Bucket Based Rate Control Algorithm with Maximum and Minimum Rate Constraints

We propose a token-bucket based rate control algorithm that satisfies both maximum and minimum rate constraints with computational complexity of O(1). The proposed algorithm allocates the remaining bandwidth in a strict priority queuing manner to the flows with different priorities and in a weighted fair queuing manner to the flows within the same priority.