A Performance Comparison of TCP Protocols over Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

The performance of wireless ad hoc networks is impacted significantly by the way TCP reacts to lost packets. TCP was designed specifically for wired, reliable networks; thus, any packet loss is attributed to congestion in the network. This assumption does not hold in wireless networks as most packet loss is due to link failure. In our research we analyzed several implementations of TCP, including TCP Vegas, TCP with ELFN, and SACK TCP, by measuring throughput, retransmissions, and duplicate acknowledgements through simulation with ns-2. We discovered that TCP throughput is related to the number of hops in the path, and thus depends on the performance of the underlying routing protocol, which was DSR in our research