TCP-ELN: on the protocol aspects and performance of explicit loss notification for TCP over wireless networks

Abstract

Recently many works have been invested to overcome the low performance of TCP in wireless environments. These proposals are hardly adaptable in real networks due to high resource demand, non scalability and difficulties in their implementation. In this paper we propose a new technique that besides of allowing TCP to improve its performance also takes applicability into account. Our solution is based on the idea of explicit loss notification (ELN) to notify the sender about packet losses on the wireless channel. We evaluate the performance of TCP-ELN with different kind of traffic and error models. Simulation results show that ELN significantly improves the efficiency and fairness performance of TCP for FTP-like and Web-like traffic.