A Novel Radio Link Protocol for TCP Throughput Enhancement

Abstract

To support TCP-based multimedia services on cellular networks, radio link protocols (RLP) are usually used to shield the channel related losses from TCP. In this paper, we categorize the RLP frames obtained by fragmenting a single TCP segment as crucial and non-crucial, and propose that different forward error correcting (FEC) schemes be applied to them. We find the fraction that constitute the crucial frames. We consider preemptive transmissions i.e., retransmissions of dropped or corrupt frames are given priority over new frames. Through qualitative analysis we demonstrate that the proposed RLP performs better than the traditional ones. We also show how the TCP throughput is improved because of the new RLP