Simulation study of TCP performance under IPv4 within integrated wired and wireless networks

In this paper, we study the TCP performance in the mobile distributed computing environment using mobileIPv4 protocol. Especially effects of TCP performance by imposing different processing overheads on the network node is investigated to see whether it is justified to ignore the node processing time in such simulation study which has been adopted by the popular network simulator-2 (NS-2). Extensive simulation using NS-2 simulator has found that there exists a very complicated nonlinear interaction among MIPv4 mobility protocol, TCP congestion control protocol and link layer packet loss recovery etc., which is far more complicated than intuitively anticipated. The conventional perception and practice that "small node processing time can be ignored" is in question. Node processing time factor must be included in network simulation settings.