D-Proxy: Reliability in wireless networks

Packet corruption negatively affects TCP through-puts because losses are interpreted as congestion. To enable TCP to operate effectively over wireless networks, a number of reliability techniques such as Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) are used. These provide reliability at the expense of increased overheads. This study provides experimental results of a new distributed Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP) called D-Proxy. This proxy can provide reliability to wireless links with minimal overhead. The results show that D-Proxy can provide near-optimal performance in the presence of high loss rates. It is suggested that D-Proxy could be used to replace current ARQ mechanisms.