Masking lossy networks by TCP tunnel with Network Coding

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with Network Coding (TCP/NC) was designed to recover the lost packets without TCP retransmission to improve the goodput performance in lossy networks. However, TCP/NC is too costly to be implemented in some types of end devices, e.g., with less memory and power. In addition, TCP/NC across loss-free but thin networks may waste scarce link bandwidth due to the redundant combination packets sacrificed for the lossy network. In this paper, we propose the TCP/NC tunnel to convey end-to-end TCP sessions on a single TCP/NC flow traversing a lossy network between two special gateways without per-flow management. We implemented and validated our proposal in Network Simulator 3, in which each gateway runs a reinforced version of TCP/NC that we previously developed. The results show that the proposed TCP/NC tunnel can mitigate the goodput degradation of end-to-end TCP sessions traversing a lossy network without any change in TCP on each end host.