A Study on TCP Performance Enhancements in Wireless Networks

The TCP protocol can provide some reliability using sliding window mechanism for data transmission, flow control, and congestion control. However, TCP has some limitations in that it has basically been designed solely for wired communication environments. If traditional TCP protocol is used also in wireless networks, the end-to-end data transmission performance degrades dramatically due to frequent packet losses caused by transmission errors and hand-offs. While there have been some research efforts on TCP enhancements considering the mobility of wireless communication devices, in this paper we propose a new method to improve the TCP performance by combining the Snoop and the Freeze-TCP methods. In the proposed scheme, the TCP end-to-end semantics is maintained and no changes of existing protocols in sending systems or in routers are required. It has the advantage of simple implementation because TCP code changes are limited to mobile devices for applying the Freeze-TCP and it requires only to add Snoop modules in base stations. Accordingly, the proposed scheme can operate well in the existing networks. Finally, in this study, we compared the performance of the proposed scheme with traditional TCP, other approaches through simulations using ns-2.