Investigating the Influence of Timer Forecasting on Transmission Efficiency of TCP Connections in Dense Muli-Hop Wi-Fi Links

Multi-hopping remains an effective solution in wireless scenarios with highly populated user strength. The internet protocol, especially the transmission control protocol (TCP) protocol, plays a huge role in the performance of systems with wireless links. The performance of TCP is heavily dependent upon the working of its timers. The TCP implementation largely trusts the retransmission timeout (RTO) timer algorithm that forecasts the packet delivery duration on a network connection. In multi-hop Wi-Fi links, RTO forecasting tumbles during impulsive round-trip time (RTT), which arises due to intermediate node re-routing and MAC retransmission. This experimental study intends to assess the effectiveness of different RTO algorithms and their impact on TCP connection transmission efficiency and latency characteristics in multi-hop Wi-Fi links. From the analysis at higher hop counts, CC-RTO obtained 35.12% and 17.2% by hybrid RTO. This study also examines the RTO's limits, like lack of accuracy in RTO estimation, and provides suggestions for lowering forecast errors in multi-hop Wi-Fi environments.