Early congestion control: A new approach to improve the performance of TCP in ad hoc networks

Abstract

Several types of research have been conducted in an attempt to improve the performance of TCP in ad hoc wireless networks. Many of these studies perform TCP side changes, which can be difficult to implement, and others seek to hide problems in the TCP link, which already proven not to be effective. In order to improve TCP performance in such networks, this paper shows the early congestion control (ECC), a new cross-layer mechanism, implemented as an active queue management (AQM), that dynamically changes the value of the window field from TCP headers according to the utilization of the router queue. The new method is TCP-Friendly and does not require TCP changes. To evaluate its performance, comparison tests were performed against Droptail and RED approaches. Results of two simulation scenarios showed that the new method increases goodput and reduces delay and the number of losses.