Transport Control Protocol (TCP) enhancement over wireless environment: Issues and challenges

With the advancement of technology, handheld devices like smart phones, ipods, PDAs, etc. have become very popular now-a-days. The real flavors of these emerging smart technologies are perceived when they are interconnected by means of wireless networks. In real-life scenario, the networks are highly heterogeneous in nature and the most popular, traditional and reliable protocol for communicating among these networks is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP is a transport layer protocol of the internet protocol suite which provides services for host-to-host connectivity in a connection-oriented manner. In a wired network, the TCP is well tuned to give a good performance for communication. The primary reason of packet losses in case of wired networks is the congestion in the network. However, the scenario is different in case of wireless communication. Here, the TCP performance issues crop up mainly due to errors in transmission and handoffs. The paper presents a comprehensive survey of various approaches pertaining to the improvement in TCP performance in wireless networks. It summarizes the various proposed methodologies and also presents the advantages and disadvantages of those approaches.