Efficiency Study of TCP Protocols in InfrastructuredWireless Networks

Traditional TCP protocols treat all packet loss as a sign of congestion. Their inability to recognize non-congestion related packet loss has significant effects on the communication efficiency in the wireless networks. Recently proposed protocols such as Freeze-TCP, TCP-Probing, TCP Westwood/Westwood+, TCP Veno, TCP-Jersey, and JTCP, all imp rove over th e traditional TCP p ro to cols. This paper reports a quantitative comparison of recent protocols against the currently most often used namely, TCP SACK, TCP NewReno, and TCP Vegas. Simulation tests were designed for various network layouts, and with differing external interferences in an attempt to most accurately simulate real-life scenarios. To carry out these comparisons, the performance of each protocol was measured based on three benchmark metrics: throughput, average congestion window, and time to complete a file transfer.