TCP with feed-forward source coding for wireless downlink networks

It is well-known that TCP connections perform poorly over wireless links due to channel fading. To combat this, techniques have been proposed where channel quality feedback is sent to the source, and the source utilizes coding techniques to adapt to the channel state. However, the round-trip time-scales quite often are mismatched to the channel-change time-scale, thus rendering these techniques to be ineffective in this regime. In this paper, we propose a source coding technique that when combined with a queueing strategy at the wireless router, eliminates the need for channel quality feedback to the source. We show that either in a multi-path environment (e.g., the mobile is multi-homed to different wireless networks) or in the presence of multiple TCP connections sharing the same wireless spectrum (where bandwidth can be opportunistically shared between different mobile users), the proposed scheme enables statistical multiplexing of resources, and thus increases TCP throughput dramatically.