PROPER: A PROxy pair for uplink PERformance enhancement in wireless access networks

Mobile end users cannot utilize high upload bandwidths that are available in wireless access networks since wireless link based packet losses degrade TCP performance dramatically. We propose a TCP performance enhancing proxy pair called PROPER that detect packet losses earlier and prevent TCP performance degradation. PROPER is transparent to TCP and requires no modifications on neither TCP sender nor receiver. PROPER works in harmony with various TCP variants like CUBIC and BBR. Netem based performance and fairness emulation tests show that PROPER prevents TCP performance degradation on wireless access networks besides it can safely coexist with regular TCP traffic.