TCP performance improvement in wireless networks with cooperative communications and network coding

Cooperative communications and network coding are considered as effective technologies to provide robust and efficient communications. Most existing studies focus on lower layer performance, such as bandwidth efficiency, and little attention has been paid to the performance in the upper layers, such as transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput. In this paper, we investigate TCP throughput in wireless networks with cooperative communications and network coding, and take a cross-layer design approach to improve TCP throughput. Wireless channels are modeled as finite sate Markov channels to characterize the structure of the fading process, and the TCP performance improvement problem is formulated as a stochastic decision process, which can be solved using linear programming and primal-dual index heuristic algorithm. Simulation results show that cooperative communications and network coding have significant impact on TCP throughput, and the TCP throughput can be improved substantially by the proposed scheme.