Coupled IEEE 802.11ac and TCP Goodput Improvement Using Aggregation and Reverse Direction

Abstract

This paper suggests a new model for the transmission of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic over IEEE 802.11 using the new features of IEEE 802.11ac. The paper examines the first step in this direction and as such we first consider a single TCP connection, which is typical in a home environment. We show that when the IEEE 802.11ac MAC is aware of QoS TCP traffic, using Reverse Direction improves the TCP Goodput in tens of percentages compared to the traditional contention based channel access. In an error-free channel this improvement is 20% while in an error-prone channel the improvement reaches 60% also using blind retransmission of frames. In our operation modes we also assume the use in Two-Level aggregation scheme, the Automatic Repeat-Request (ARQ) protocol of the IEEE 802.11ac MAC layer, the data rates and the four Access Categories defined in this standard.