Loss Detection and Recovery Techniques for TCP in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Currently, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant protocol used in the Internet. It is the transport protocol that is responsible for the transmission of around 90% of the Internet traffic. TCP was originally designed for wired network where packet loss due to congestion dominates. Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), one of the wireless networks, has special characteristics which cause several types of losses that are not related to congestion; leading to violate some design concepts of TCP because TCP handles any loss as a sign of congestion. In this paper, we provide an overview on MANET characteristics that cause packet loss. Afterwards, a survey on the recent solutions that propose loss detection and recovery techniques is conducted, placing special emphasis on proposals that preserve end-to-end semantic.