Performance Evaluation of TCP over Wireless Links

Nowadays, most widely used transport protocol, TCP is tuned to perform well in traditional networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. TCP performs reliable end-to-end packet transmission under the assumption of low packet error rate. However, networks with wireless links suffer from significant losses due to high error rate and handoffs. TCP responds to all losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in inefficient use of network bandwidth and degraded end-to-end performance in that system. To solve this problem, several methods have been proposed. In this paper, we analyse and compare these methods and propose appropriate model for improving TCP performance in the network with wireless links. This model uses TCP selective acknowledgement (SACK) option between TCP ends, and also uses caching method at the base station. Our simulation results show that using TCP SACK option with base station caching significantly reduces unnecessary duplicate retransmissions and recover packet losses effectively.