IEEE 802.11n/ac Wireless Network Efficiency under different TCP Congestion Controls

Since the definition of the bufferbloat phenomenon, several Linux kernel modules have been introduced in the TCP/IP stack. While these solutions have been widely studied over wired networks, there is a lack of experimental results involving WLAN technologies, in particular, IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac. One important algorithm introduced is named TCP Small Queues (TSQ) and has the role of limiting the number of packets that a TCP socket can enqueue in the stack, waiting for the physical layer to deliver the packets before enqueueing extra data. This mechanism breaks the frame aggregation logic on WLAN and compromises the throughput-latency tradeoff of all the TCP variants. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of this problem investigating the network efficiency of several TCP congestion controls under the presence of different TSQ policies.