A Queue Management Mechanism for Improving TCP fairness in Wireless Access Networks

Due to the contention nature of Wi-Fi medium access control, several fairness issues exist. Moreover, the Access Point (AP) buffer space plays an important role in the provisioning of fairness to the flows. This paper presents a novel queue management technique designed to ameliorate fairness problems in Wi-Fi last mile networks. The proposed mechanism allocates the AP buffer space based on information available at the mobile nodes and sent to AP via link layer acknowledgement frames. The proposed mechanism is transparent to higher layers as well to the wired part of the network. Performance results show that the novel mechanism leads to considerable improvement when compared to traditional drop-tail queue management.