Analyzing the TCP performance on mobile ad-hoc networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented protocol for reliable end-to-end data delivery over IP networks. Many TCP variants assume that packet loss occurs due to network congestion when wired networks have very low bit error rate. TCP reacts to unreliable network conditions by slowing down the data flow with congestion window adjustment. However, the nature of frequent noise in wireless networks heavily affects the conditions of packet loss, bit error and spurious packets. In mobile ad-hoc networks, multi-hop path forwarding further exacerbates the packet loss and throughput performance. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the TCP performance in wireless, and mobile ad hoc environments. This study first examines the effects of TCP throughput under different scales of data block sizes and TCP window sizes, respectively. This study also examines the packet delivery rate, hop counts, and flow counts with two practical routing protocols, AODV and OLSR, in mobile ad-hoc network environments. Experimental results show the sensitivities of TCP performance to various measure parameters in 802.11 wireless and ad-hoc networks.