A Probabilistic Approach for Improving TCP Fairness across Multiple Contending WLANs

Contention among multiple nearby WLANs in urban areas may cause severe TCP unfairness, where some TCP flows can achieve very high throughput at the expense of starving others. This unfairness results from the fact that different physical nodes conveying TCP flows at a wireless bottleneck may have different channel observations and consequently they may provide inconsistent feedbacks to the TCP sources. Existing solutions to this problem try to synchronize channel observations of contending nodes by exchanging control messages among them. They rely on the assumption that these nodes are within each other''s transmission range, which however may not always hold. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called Wireless Probabilistic Drop (WPD), to improve TCP fairness without requiring direct communication among nodes. In WPD, when a node detects congestion, it probabilistically chooses to either drop some packets to resolve the congestion, or aggressively spread the congestion signal to other contending nodes. Each node makes the choice with a probability that is proportional to its flow rate. Henceforth, high-rate flows tend to perform rate reduction more often, and low-rate flows are more likely to increase their flow rates. Eventually, all flows passing the bottleneck are expected to get a fair share of the channel bandwidth. Extensive simulations in ns-2 demonstrate that WPD can significantly improve fairness among TCP flows across multiple contending WLANs.