TCP-UEM: Detecting link failure by keeping end-to-end semantics

The evolution of computer networks has happened, in most cases, on the wired networks. However, the appearance of the wireless network, called “revolution wireless”, brought some challenges. The use of the technologies belonging to the wired networks on wireless networks is not appropriate. Some challenges are in the transport layer, in which are TCP and UDP. These protocols evolved to answer problems mainly found in wired networks. The use of the TCP and its mechanism to avoid congestion on wireless networks introduce important problems, such as, misinterpretation of route failures as congestion, misinterpretation of link errors as congestion, inefficiency when dealing with contention both internal and external to the node, inefficiency caused by spurious retransmission, poor conservation of energy of the node, among others. Many solutions have been investigated and most of them change the original TCP to solve one or more problems, but not all. Others solutions try to solve the problems designing a new protocol. In this paper we present a new TCP variant, called TCP-UEM, which aims at detecting link failures while maintaining the end-to-end semantic of the original TCP in order to avoid the congestion mechanism to be erroneously executed. Some of the simulations carried out to evaluate TCP-UEM are described as well as the statistical analysis of the results.