A Comprehensive Study on Different Variants of TCP Protocol in Wireless Network

Today’s world is highly dependent on the internet, and as a result, the usage of the internet in all aspects of our lives is rapidly rising. The congestion control algorithm is a crucial component of TCP. It was built on the idea that packet loss is generally relatively minimal and that packet loss is consequently an indicator of network congestion. The congestion control algorithm used by a specific version of TCP determines its performance characteristics. This paper will give an overview of different TCP variants, their characteristics, and comparisons in wireless networks. In this paper, we have experimented with four TCP variants (TCP CUBIC, TCP Vegas, TCP YeAH, TCP Westwood Plus) and analyzed their performance for a varying number of nodes. The performance of TCP protocols was experimentally evaluated using Network Simulator Version-3 (NS3). Our results demonstrated that TCP CUBIC outperformed other variants in terms of packet loss and throughput. Regarding packet loss, TCP CUBIC suffered a substantially lower average packet loss than other TCP variations. Furthermore, TCP CUBIC’s average throughput was marginally higher than TCP Westwood Plus and TCP YeAH, but significantly higher than TCP Vegas.