A study of TCP performance and buffer occupancy over a fading wireless link

This paper presents a use of M/G/1 queuing theory to study the impact of fading, and also the benefits of link layer retransmission mechanisms on the performance of the TCP protocol. Our results show that both TCP throughput and buffer occupancy vary as a function of the speed of a mobile host, and TCP performance improves with higher vehicle speed. We also show that when the propagation delay in the wireline network is large, link layer re-transmissions can significantly improve the TCP performance, though it also increases the buffer occupancy.