Enhanced Split TCP with End-to-End Protocol Semantics over Wireless Networks

The global mobile traffic is exponentially growing and more than 90% of the Internet traffic uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for reliable transmission. However, TCP is known to perform poorly over unreliable wireless networks. One of the promising families of solutions to improve the performance of TCP is centered on Split-TCP. However, while Split-TCP may improve the protocol performance, it is vulnerable due to the broken end-to-end semantics. Several variants have been proposed to overcome this pitfall, but while they address the broken semantics, they also defeat the main purpose by compromising the TCP performance gains. In this paper, we propose a novel Enhanced Split-TCP (ES-TCP) mechanism, which significantly improves the application throughput without breaking the end-to-end TCP semantics. Experimental results show that the proposed ES-TCP may boost the TCP throughput by more than 60% in average when exercised over an operational 4G LTE network. Furthermore, the TCP throughput performance improvement may be even over 200%, depending on the network and usage conditions. We expect such throughput gains may be even greater when advanced radio technologies, such as 5G, are deployed. For these reasons, the ES-TCP is a promising transport layer solution for the current and next generation networks.