Study of the TCP Unfairness in a Wireless Environment

In this paper we analyze the TCP performance degradation introduced by a wireless media having transmission errors and the capability of the following mechanisms to correct it (i) improvements over the TCP Reno release (SACK, New-Reno and FACK); (ii) improvements over the classical “tail dropping” mechanism used by routers (RED and ECN); and (iii) a TCP implementation based on the usage of ECN routers that would be able to distinguish among losses due to congestion and losses due to transmission errors. Furthermore, we have analyzed the unfairness that occurs when TCP sources having high transmission error rates compete with sources having low transmission error rates.