Enhancement of IFTP for transmission over wireless access networks

Abstract

This paper presents a new end-to-end transport protocol designed to enhance the performance of Internet friendly multimedia applications transmitted over a wireless network. This protocol is an enhancement of Internet friendly transport protocol (IFTP) that we designed to alleviate the TCP-friendly problem. Similar to IFTP, the proposed protocol is designed to avoid congestion, as indicated by either retransmission timer expiration or the receipt of multiple duplicate ACKs, by reducing the transmission flow. However, due to the relatively high bit error rate of most wireless mediums, packet drops are often not the result of network congestion. Hence, they result in unnecessary reduction of throughput. The proposed protocol differentiates between packet loss due to congestion and wireless errors and so maintains higher throughput in such environments. In addition, it still maintains its fairness and TCP-friendliness properties.