TCP FECN: a unified solution for wireless networks

Reliable transport protocols such as TCP are tuned to perform well in traditional wired networks, where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However, networks with wireless and other lossy links also suffer from significant losses due to bit errors and handoffs. TCP interprets these delays and losses as signs of network congestion and responds to all these losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in degraded end-to-end performance in wireless and lossy systems. Most of the existing results of TCP for wireless networks are either take care of high bit error rate (BER) at the wireless links or the frequent handoffs and disconnections. This paper presents an integrated TCP mechanism to be used in mobile environments. It takes care of random bit errors on the wireless link, the congestion in the network and typical handoffs; in a cellular network scenario without violating end-to-end semantics.