TCP fairness measures for scheduling algorithms in wireless networks

This paper presents two new layer 4 fairness measures, the worst case TCP fairness index and the TCP fairness index. The purpose of the two indices is to measure the performance of algorithms scheduling elastic traffic in wireless networks. Numerical evaluation of round-robin, proportional-fair and max-rate scheduling shows that the new measures can accurately classify the fairness properties of the studied scheduling algorithms. This means that the new fairness measures are appropriate for measuring TCP fairness. The worst case TCP fairness index is the primary measure. The TCP fairness index can be used as a complement in certain cases. The new fairness measures are also compared with two layer 2 fairness measures. Numerical evaluation shows that the new layer 4 measures and the layer 2 measures in some aspects show similar results. However, when evaluating transport layer fairness, it is better to use the new layer 4 measures as they actually measure fairness on layer 4 and the results are easier to interpret