The Effect of Opportunistic Scheduling on TCP Performance over Shared Wireless Downlink

Much work has been done to modify the TCP protocol to improve TCP performance - mainly throughput, over wireless link. However, such improvements need to change the TCP implementation on user systems, which is usually difficult to deploy. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of enhancing the TCP performance over wireless link by tuning the packet scheduling schemes. Based on an opportunistic packet scheduling algorithm we proposed, we demonstrate that TCP throughput can be significantly improved by using channel-aware packet scheduling algorithms without changing the TCP implementation. Our work suggests that in cases where it is impractical to change the TCP protocols, packet scheduling is an effective way to improve the TCP performance over wireless links.