Throughput Unfairness in TCP over WiFi

This paper presents a measurement study of TCP performance at an operational WiFi deployment. After presenting the network topology and the tools used to generate and analyze traffic, we examine the throughput performance of competing TCP connections. We investigate how throughput is divided among the participating wireless hosts with respect to signal strength, traffic direction and use of the RTS/CTS mechanism. Our study shows that while competing clients with comparable signal strength are treated fairly, achieving similar throughput values, clients with lower signal strength are treated unfairly, relinquishing a larger share of the available bandwidth to clients with higher signal strength

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