TCP-cognizant adaptive forward error correction in wireless networks

Wireless links are characterized by high bit error rates and intermittent connectivity. This can result in significant degradation in the performance (goodput) of TCP over wireless networks since non-congestion related packet losses can be misinterpreted by TCP as indications of network congestion, resulting in unnecessary congestion control. In this paper, we propose a technique, TCP with adaptive forward error correction (TCP-AFEC), to improve TCP performance over wireless networks. TCP-AFEC combines the well-established performance characterization of TCP with an understanding of the link layer error control scheme to dynamically select the forward error correction (FEC) that maximizes TCP goodput according to the current channel condition. The benefit of coupling a characterization of TCP performance with link layer FEC to improve TCP goodput is demonstrated by comparing the performance of TCP-AFEC against those of TCP-SACK and Snoop. Simulation results show that TCP-AFEC outperforms TCP-SACK and Snoop for a wide range of wireless channel conditions.