Performance of TCP over 802.11ac based WLANs via testbed measurements

Abstract

This paper presents measurement results collected from an IEEE 802.11ac based wireless test-bed to experimentally demonstrate how 802.11ac affects the throughput performance of a WLAN with different Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) variants implemented in Linux kernel. We compare the performance of 802.11ac with 802.11n for both single and multi-hop transmissions in a wireless mesh network (WMN). Our first observation is that the single-hop performance of 802.11ac outperforms 802.11n, however, as the number of transmission hops increases 802.11ac does not have a significant advantage over 802.11n. In addition, our measurement results show that the best throughput performance with the minimum standard deviation is achieved by TCP CUBIC and TCP BIC for multi-hop transmission. Lastly, we present the results on the behavior of congestion window (CW) with each TCP variant, and observe that the convergence time of the CW is smaller with 802.11ac for both single hop and multi-hop scenarios.