Differentiating congestion vs. random loss: a method for improving TCP performance over wireless links

Previous research has focussed on the problems associated with TCP performance in the presence of wireless links and ways to improve its performance. We present an extension to TCP Santa Cruz which improves TCP performance over lossy wireless links. TCP has no mechanism to differentiate random losses on the wireless link from congestion, and therefore treats all losses as congestive. We present a simple method in which our protocol is able to differentiate these random losses, thereby avoiding the rate-halving approach taken by standard TCP whenever any loss is detected. We compare the performance of our protocol against TCP Reno and demonstrate higher throughput and lower end-to-end delay with our approach.