TCP performance enhancement in wireless/mobile communications

Abstract

The operation of TCP in wireless/mobile environments is considered. After briefly presenting previous efforts to ameliorate TCP performance in the considered environments, we propose a new mechanism for tackling the problems caused by handovers. Our mechanism is based on stochastic datagram relocation. Traffic destined to the mobile terminal is tunneled to adjacent cells according to the output of a path prediction algorithm. To reduce the associated overhead, only percentages of inbound traffic are copied to the cell's neighborhood on the basis of estimated probabilities. Through simulations, we have measured the effects that stochastic datagram relocation has on TCP dynamics.