An Experimental Evaluation of Sender-Side TCP Enhancements for Wired-to-Wireless Paths: A Real-World Home WLAN Case Study

In this paper we evaluate the performances of recently proposed sender-side TCP enhancements designed to alleviate TCPpsilas deficiencies over wired-to-wireless paths. Our goal is to compare the performances of the legacy TCP RENO, CUBIC, HYBLA, VENO, and WESTWOOD+, which are available to researchers via pluggable congestion control algorithms in the recent Linux v2.6 kernels. We conducted experiments over a custom-built wired-to-wireless testbed consisting of a real-world infrastructure WLAN within a home environment, and a Linux server with real implementations of the various TCP algorithms. Our focus is on the achieved end-to-end TCP throughputs and transfer times for small, medium, and large data transfers from the fixed TCP server to a last-hop wireless client. We also present insights of the average TCP RTO timer values for each TCP algorithm during the experiments.