Optimizing TCP Performance in Multi-AP Residential Broadband Connections via Minislot Access

The high bandwidth demand of Internet applications has recently driven the need of increasing the residential download speed. A practical solution to the problem is to aggregate the bandwidth of 802.11 access points (APs) backhauls in range. Since 802.11 devices are usually single radio, the communi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Domenico Giustiniano, Eduard Goma, Alberto Lopez Toledo, George Athanasiou
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Hindawi Limited 2013-01-01
Series:Journal of Computer Networks and Communications
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/752363
Description
Summary:The high bandwidth demand of Internet applications has recently driven the need of increasing the residential download speed. A practical solution to the problem is to aggregate the bandwidth of 802.11 access points (APs) backhauls in range. Since 802.11 devices are usually single radio, the communication to APs on different radio channels requires a time-division multiple access (TDMA) policy at the client station. With an in-depth experimental analysis and a customized 802.11 driver, in this paper, we show that the usage of multi-AP TDMA policy may cause degradation of the TCP throughput and an underutilization of the AP backhauls. We then introduce a simple analytical model that accurately predicts the TCP round-trip time (RTT) with a multi-AP TDMA policy and propose a resource allocation algorithm to reduce the observed TCP RTT with a very low computational cost. Our proposed scheme runs locally at the client station and improves the aggregate throughput up to 1.5 times compared to state-of-the-art allocations. We finally show that the throughput achieved by our algorithm is very close to the theoretical upper bound in key simulation scenarios.
ISSN:2090-7141
2090-715X