Improving ECN-based TCP performance over wireless networks using a homogeneous implementation of EWLN

We present an explicit wireless loss notification (EWLN) for an ECN (explicit congestion notification) enabled wired-and-wireless network. ECN is proposed to improve TCP performance by marking instead of dropping packets to indicate an incipient congestion in the wired network. The ECN mechanism has many benefits, and performs especially well in low-bandwidth delay sensitive TCP connections. However, it is not efficient enough in wireless networks. Since ECN-based TCP has been proven to work very well in traditional wired networks, we propose implementing an EWLN scheme that improves performance of ECN-based TCP over wired-and-wireless networks. The scheme deploys the information from the MAC layer and takes into account the interaction with the error recovery mechanism at the link layer. In addition, the scheme does not require different implementations for mobile terminals and base stations and hence can support efficient data transmission over wired-and-wireless networks.