TCP Performance in Multi-Polling Game Theory based IEEE 802.11 networks

Easy usage and integration with various applications made IEEE 802.11 one of the most used technologies these days, both at home and business premises [1]. Over the years, there have been additional improvements to 802.11 standards. The very first important mechanism, which added additional performance gains, was frame aggregation and block-acknowledgements (block-acks). However, this still does not provide good efficiency, thus we can see various performance problems in dense wireless networks. One of the many problems is TCP performance degradation due to delayed acknowledgement transmissions and the overall handling of medium acquisition. Newly introduced version of IEEE 802.11ac brought some important performance updates such as additional modulation capabilities or interference mitigation. Nevertheless, the principals and Media Access Control (MAC) layer methods are almost the same as in previous Wi-Fi versions. Therefore, a more efficient MAC layer protocol would add additional benefit for newly released IEEE 802.11ac and currently existing IEEE 802.11n standards. In this paper, we will do a case study of IEEE 802.11e Hybrid Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) and Polling Mechanism. We will consider various methods to bypass the limitations of already existing CSMA/CA protocol as well as polling based protocols. Additionally, we will introduce the arising problems and currently available implementations of IEEE 802.11 improvements for TCP performance