An enhancement scheme for TCP over mobile ad hoc networks

In a mobile ad hoc network, temporary link failures and route changes occur frequently. With the assumption that all packet losses are due to congestion, TCP performs poorly in such an environment. This paper proposes a new mechanism called TSR, TCP-aware source routing, which can improve TCP performance in wireless ad hoc networks. TSR adds a hold state to an existing routing protocol to reduce consecutive timeouts, retransmission, and out-of-ordered packets in TCP. In our simulation study, TSR achieves up to a 60% improvement in performance, without requiring any TCP stacks in end systems to be modified.