The effects of asymmetry on TCP performance

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effects of network asymmetry on end‐to‐end TCP performance and suggest techniques to improve it. The networks investigated in this study include a wireless cable modem network and a packet radio network, both of which can form an important part of a mobile ad hoc network. In recent literature (e.g., [18]), asymmetry has been considered in terms of a mismatch in bandwidths in the two directions of a data transfer. We generalize this notion of bandwidth asymmetry to other aspects of asymmetry, such as latency and media‐access, and packet error rate, which are common in wide‐area wireless networks. Using a combination of experiments on real networks and simulation, we analyze TCP performance in such networks where the throughput achieved is not solely a function of the link and traffic characteristics in the direction of data transfer (the forward direction), but depends significantly on the reverse direction as well. We focus on bandwidth and latency asymmetries, and propose and evaluate several techniques to improve end‐to‐end performance. These include techniques to decrease the rate of acknowledgments on the constrained reverse channel (ack congestion control and ack filtering), techniques to reduce source burstiness when acknowledgments are infrequent (TCP sender adaptation), and algorithms at the reverse bottleneck router to schedule data and acks differently from FIFO (acks‐first scheduling).