Techniques for Enhancing TCP Performance in Wireless Networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries the maximum Internet traffic, so performance of TCP largely affects the performance of Internet. However, end-to-end throughput in TCP degrades notably when operated in wireless networks, since random packet losses and packet reordering are considered as congestion. In wireless networks, due to high bit error rate and changing level of congestion, retransmission timeouts for packets lost in transmission is unavoidable. TCP misinterprets this loss to congestion and invokes congestion control by triggering fast retransmission and fast recovery, leading to under-utilization of the network resources. This paper presents various performance improvement mechanisms by which TCP does not consider every packet loss as congestion. These mechanisms help TCP to distinguish between congestion and packet loss and increase throughput performance.