Performance evaluation of existing wireless TCP variants for high data rate wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) are currently being used widely in innumerable types of applications. Each one of these applications may have different data rate, i.e., some applications may have low data rate and others may have high data rate. WSN should be designed to fine tune their performance to meet these varying data rates. Due to the stringent resource constraints and highly application specific nature of WSN, it is very difficult to support these varying data rates. This task of supporting high data rate in WSN becomes very much crucial in case of applications meant for processing heterogeneous sensor data which could be scalar data, still images etc., which may be being generated at very high rate. This paper makes an effort to evaluate the performance of chosen existing wireless TCP variants in case of high data rate WSN. In this regard, this paper presents brief summary of chosen wireless TCP variants, simulations carried out using NS2, results, and the analysis of the results. The paper will be concluded with identification of some major research issues in designing TCP protocols for high data rate WSN.