TPA: a transport protocol for ad hoc networks

Several previous works have shown that TCP exhibits poor performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The ultimate reason for this is that MANETs behave in a significantly different way from traditional wired networks, like the Internet, for which TCP was originally designed. In this paper we propose a novel transport protocol - named TPA - specifically tailored to the characteristics of the MANET environment. It is based on a completely new congestion control mechanism, and designed in such a way to minimize the number of useless transmissions and, hence, power consumption. Furthermore, it is able to manage efficiently route changes and route failures. We evaluated the TPA protocol in a static scenario where TCP exhibits good performance. Simulation results show that, even in such a scenario, TPA significantly outperforms TCP.