A study of TCP performance over wireless data networks

Wireless networks typically have higher average packet delay, higher variance in packet delay and higher packet loss than wired networks. The TCP windowing algorithm was not designed to optimally handle packet loss and variable delay due to errors. The scope of this paper is to focus on reducing the packet loss and the round trip time (RTT) by improving the routing and the data-link layers of the wireless network. The paper also suggests removing Van Jacobson header compression in a lossy network because it elevates a single packet loss to the loss of a complete window of information. We also show the improvement in performance by tuning the client TCP parameters such as MTU and window size.