A comprehensive experimental analysis of standard TCP variants in vehicular environment

Abstract

Efforts were made to integrate emerging Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANETs) with the mobile internet architecture through Road Side Unit (RSU) to enhance its operational capabilities for safety and non safety applications. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the prominent protocol that contributes a considerable amount of internet traffic as the vast majority of internet applications such as file transfer, messaging service, mail services, etc. was based on TCP. However, TCP performs poorly under vehicular wireless environment due to its high mobility and wireless errors such as fading and interferences that lead to unpredicted packet drop. In this paper the behavioral aspects of existing standard TCP variants such as Vegas, Compound, Westwood, New Reno, BIC and CUBIC were rigorously tested and analyzed under vehicular environment for variable speed and traffic. This analysis forms a foundation work in designing TCP exclusively for vehicular environment.