Experimental study of TCP unfairness in IEEE802.11-based ad hoc network

TCP is a transport layer protocol providing end-to-end reliable data transfer over IP based network. Wired TCP versions have been developed many years and have good performance. When they are deployed in wireless environment, they show poor performance. In this paper we present our evaluation on TCP performance in the term of throughput unfairness in an IEEE802.11-based ad hoc network. We evaluate TCP unfairness using experimental approach by performing measurement in a real life testbed. Two scenarios, representing hidden and exposed terminal situations, are used. In one of scenario we also vary the traffic load to see the effect of the traffic load to TCP-fairness. In each scenario we measure the throughput and calculate TCP fairness using Jain´s fairness index formula.