Enhancing 802.11 DCF MAC for TCP/IP communication

In this paper, we focus on the overhead caused by the conflict between TCP/IP and IEEE 802.11 technologies and propose two schemes: partial retransmission and ACK suppression to alleviate this issue. Our schemes can improve communication performance and error resiliency simultaneously in TCP/IP communication over 802.11 networks. Because our schemes require modification only to the IEEE 802.11 DCF and do not require any modification in IP or higher layers, users can use these schemes by replacing the 802.11 interfaces or device drivers of mobile machines and 802.11 access points. This means that the deployment issue of our scheme will be minor compared to the other solutions that require modifications of TCP/IP protocols or applications. Furthermore, the design of our schemes are quite simple so that they can be used in low CPU power devices, which is an important factor for mobile devices.