WLC29-5: TCP Fairness for Uplink and Downlink Flows in WLANs

In WLANs, fairness is an important issue because the channel is shared by many users. This paper proposes a dual queue based scheme in an access point (AP) for TCP fairness among uplink flows and downlink flows. First, we discuss the unfairness problem of TCP flows due to different responses to data packet drop and TCP ACK packet drop at the AP. The proposed scheme employs two queues, one for the data packets of downlink TCP flows and another for the ACK packets corresponding to uplink TCP flows. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation and the results are presented. The dual queue scheme is simple and effective for resolving the TCP unfairness problem.