Review of TCP optimizations to enhance its performance over wireless networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable transport layer protocol designed having wired networks in mind. When used over wireless networks, which have more losses due to channel errors, TCP's performance degrades depending on link quality and delay. This is because TCP interprets all losses in the network as a result of congestion, which causes TCP to lower data transfer rate and reduce link utilization. To address this problem, many variants of TCP were proposed to optimize its performance over wireless networks. In this paper, I review some of these variants after classifying them based on their basic concept into: link layer, end-to-end, explicit notification, or split connection proposals.