Analysis of the interaction between TCP variants and routing protocols in MANETs

IETF MANET (mobile ad hoc network) working group has standardized AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector) and OLSR (optimized link state routing) as its reactive and proactive routing protocols, respectively. In addition, from the transport layer's perspective, TCP (transmission control protocol) is still needed for MANET since it is widely used in the current Internet and suitable for smooth integration with the fixed Internet. Particularly, TCP has its variants, namely TCP-Reno and TCP-Vegas. However, there has been no research work on extensive performance comparison of TCP-Reno and TCP-Vegas over AODV and OLSR. This paper is the first trial to perform the research by using ns-2 simulator. Through the extensive simulations, we found that which to select among routing protocols is more important than which to select among TCP variants, because the performance difference between TCP-Reno and TCP-Vegas over any selected routing protocol is not so much outstanding.