TCP performance improvement considering ACK loss in ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, packet loss is unavoidable due to MAC contention, link failure or the inherent characteristics of wireless link. Since TCP relies on the timely reception of TCP ACK packets to progress the transmission of the TCP DATA packets, ACK loss obviously affects the performance due to two main problems: (a) Frequent occurrence of spurious retransmissions caused by timeout events and (b) impairment of the fast retransmit mechanism caused by the lack of a sufficient number of duplicate ACK packets. In particular, since most reactive routing protocols force the packets buffered over a path to be discarded while performing a route recovery, the performance degradation becomes more serious due to such ACK loss. In this paper, therefore, TCP with two piggybacking schemes (called TCP-pgy) is proposed in order to resolve the above-mentioned problems over reactive routing protocols. Through extensive simulations using the ns-2 simulator, we prove that our proposed schemes contribute to TCP performance improvements.