On Multihop vs. End-to-End Transport

In cellular and WiFi networks, traffic is routed via IP independently of its nature and content, using TCP or variants of TCP as the (connection-oriented) transport layer protocol of choice. In this paper, we present a closer look at the communication theoretical distribution of channel capacities on heterogeneous multihop transmissions. We prove that a multihop perspective can significantly reduce the required redundancy (~ 43% for four segments and ~ 52% for five segments). Our contribution is to further motivate smart network devices and functionalities.