TCP (transmission control protocol) over wireless links

The congestion control policy of the transmission control protocol (TCP) works well today over a wide range of networks. However, if a TCP connection consists of erroneous links, for example, in wireless environment, degradation in throughput and delay performance can be significant. We use simple analysis on the TCP window dynamics to determine the end-to-end throughput of a TCP connection with a wireless link and to demonstrate the impact of high error rate in a wireless environment. To improve the performance of the TCP in a wireless environment, a simple modification to the TCP, which uses negative acknowledgment as an explicit notification for packet corruption is proposed. The performance of the proposed "NACK"-based scheme is compared with an existing modified version, LHACK, for both binary and Rayleigh fading channels.