Modelling TCP Reno with spurious timeouts in wireless mobile environments

Abstract

TCP has been found to perform poorly in the presence of spurious timeouts (ST) caused by delay spikes which are especially more frequent in today's wireless mobile networks than in traditional wired network. Because STs are generally considered to represent a transient state in wired networks, previous research did not consider the effects of ST on the steady state performance of TCP. In this paper, we propose an analytical model for the sending rate and throughput of TCP Reno as a function of packet error rate and characteristics of spurious timeouts. The proposed model has been validated against simulation results and has been found to be more accurate than previous models in the presence of spurious timeouts.