Enhanced loss differentiation algorithms for use in TCP sources over heterogeneous wireless networks

Loss differentiation algorithms (LDA) are used to provide TCP with an estimate of the cause of packet losses, to improve performance over heterogeneous networks including wired and wireless links. In this work, we compared by simulation the accuracy of several LDA schemes in various realistic scenarios. We experienced that LDA schemes originally proposed in literature exhibit poor performance in estimating the cause of packet losses. Thus, we propose enhancements to the noncongestion packet loss detection (NCPLD) and Vegas schemes, achieving higher accuracy in all network scenarios. We shown that our proposed enhanced schemes approach reasonably ideal accuracy of LDA having perfect knowledge of the cause of packet losses. These results entail the possibility to adopt such algorithms within TCP congestion control, to achieve higher performance over heterogeneous wireless networks.