The shared nature of the wireless medium induces contention between data transport and backward signaling, such as acknowledgment. The current way of TCP acknowledgment induces control overhead which is counter-productive for TCP performance especially in wireless local area network (WLAN) scenarios. In this paper, we present a new acknowledgment called TACK (“Tame ACK”), as well as its TCP implementation TCP-TACK. TACK seeks to minimize ACK frequency, which is exactly what is required by transport. TCP-TACK works on top of commodity WLAN, delivering high wireless transport goodput with minimal control overhead in the form of ACKs, without any hardware modification. Evaluation results show that TCP-TACK achieves significant advantages over legacy TCP in WLAN scenarios due to less contention between data packets and ACKs. Specifically, TCP-TACK reduces over 90% of ACKs and also obtains an improvement of up to 28% on goodput. A TACK-based protocol is a good replacement of the legacy TCP to compensate for scenarios where the acknowledgment overhead is non-negligible.

The shared nature of the wireless medium induces contention between data transport and backward signaling, such as acknowledgement. The current way of TCP acknowledgment induces control overhead which is counter-productive for TCP performance especially in wireless local area network (WLAN) scenarios.