Joint TCP congestion control and wireless-link scheduling for mobile Internet applications

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, which is used by major Internet applications such as World Wide Web, email, remote administration and file transfer. TCP implements scalable and distributed end-to-end congestion control algorithms to share network resources among competing users. TCP was originally designed primarily for wired networks, and it has performed remarkably well as the Internet scaled up by six orders of magnitude in the past decade. However, many studies have shown that the unmodified standard TCP performs poorly in networks with large bandwidth-delay products and/or lossy wireless links. In this thesis, we analyze the problems TCP exhibits in the wireless communication environment, and develop joint TCP congestion control and wireless-link scheduling schemes for mobile applications. ... Different from the existing solutions, the proposed schemes can be asynchronously implemented without message passing among network nodes; thus they are readily deployable with current infrastructure. Moreover, global convergence/stability of the proposed schemes to optimal equilibrium is established using the Lyapunov method in the network fluid model. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the proposed schemes in practical networks.