A new explicit loss notification with acknowledgment for wireless TCP

Abstract

Due to common usage of the TCP/IP protocol stack in Internet applications that require reliable data transfer, it is important to keep the protocol stack (and also the network element structure) as unchanged as possible even when mobility features required in wireless Internet are added into the network. However, TCP performs poorly in wireless networks running at high bit error rates. In this paper, a new enhancement to TCP based on a previously proposed scheme is introduced. The method is based on the Snoop protocol and is similarly used for fixed host to mobile host direction. The proposed method has been compared with the Snoop protocol and other enhancement protocols proposed for the wireless TCP. It has been shown that the new explicit loss notification with acknowledgement has superior performance to Snoop and other protocols. The proposed method improves the end-to-end reliable transport performance in mobile environments.