Performance analysis of different TCP variants in wireless ad hoc networks

Transmission control protocol is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control protocol used by most of the networks. Significance of TCP is the congestion control mechanism that controls TCP sending rate and makes TCP react to congestion signals. Variety of TCP variants is available to suite to the requirements of various networks. TCP is a transport layer protocol that ensures ordered delivery of packets which complements the Internet Protocol (IP) at network layer. Routing is the main job at the network layer. There are various routing protocols that are used to route the packets. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of the TCP variants — TCP Tahoe, TCP Reno, TCP New Reno over routing protocols — AODV, DSDV and DSR using the NS-2 network simulator. These results can be further used to conduct any experiments with proper combinations of TCP and routing protocols.