Choosing a TCP Version over Static Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: Wired TCP or Wireless TCP?

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was originally designed to operate on wired networks. However, nowadays the traffic on wireless networks has grown to a point where one must take into account the specific characteristics of such networks when setting up a particular TCP implementation on them. Particularly, the TCP performance has been studied over ad hoc wireless networks leading to several new implementations for TCP. The main issue for TCP on ad hoc wireless networks is to differentiate between losses due to congestion and losses occurred at lower network layers. In this paper, we analyze the TCP performance on two different scenarios of static ad hoc wireless networks over the DSDV routing protocol. Our findings show that choosing the right TCP version for ad hoc wireless networks is a key factor for their performance. We show for the scenarios we study, that TCP Reno outperforms TCP Westwood on the average loss rate as well as on the throughput.