Delayed duplicate acknowledgements: a TCP‐Unaware approach to improve performance of TCP over wireless

Abstract Since a TCP sender cannot distinguish between packet losses arising from transmission errors from those due to congestion, TCP tends to perform poorly on wireless links that are prone to transmission errors. Several techniques have previously been proposed to improve TCP performance over wireless links. Existing schemes typically require an intermediate node (typically, a base station) to be TCP‐aware. For instance, the Snoop scheme requires the base station to interpret TCP headers and take appropriate action to help improve TCP performance. This paper proposes an alternativeTCP‐unawaretechnique that attempts to mimic the behavior of the Snoop protocol. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed Delayed Dupacks scheme performs quite well. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.