Transport Layer Fairness and Congestion Control in Multihop Wireless Networks

Transmission control protocol (TCP) is a reliable, end-to-end transport protocol, which is widely used for data services and is very efficient for wired networks. However, experiments and research showed that TCP´s congestion control algorithm performs very poorly over wireless ad hoc networks with degraded throughputs and severe unfairness among flows. This paper studies TCP´s fairness and throughput issues in wireless ad hoc access networks, and designs an improved congestion control algorithm based on the characteristics of the wireless ad hoc access networks. The protocol is designed as extension to DCCP (datagram congestion control protocol) with a new congestion control component. We also implemented this congestion control algorithm in NS2. Simulation results show improvements on fairness and throughput achieved by using our congestion control algorithm.