A novel scheme for improving good throughput performance in wireless local networks

With the fast-paced deployment of wireless local networks, improving good throughput performance becomes more and more important to support various multimedia services. In this paper, we develop a novel scheme for such a purpose, which comprises two parts: a TCP quick-timeout (TCP-QT) algorithm and an adaptive frame size algorithm. The TCP-QT algorithm is to reduce the TCP timeout overhead, and the adaptive frame size algorithm is to reduce the number of retransmissions in the MAC layer. Using feedback from the MAC layer, the TCP layer can be made aware of the transmission history of a packet in the MAC layer. If a packet has been dropped by the MAC layer, a quick timeout in the TCP layer is triggered, resulting in a fast retransmission of the packet. Thus, the average good throughput observed in the application layer is greatly improved, while the current TCP semantics are largely unchanged. Then, we integrated an adaptive frame size algorithm into the TCP-QT algorithm for further performance improvement. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the energy efficiency by up to 5 times.