Cross layer approach to enhance TCP performance over wireless networks

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the almost universally used reliable transport protocol in the Internet, has been engineered to perform well in wired networks. TCP throughput, however, degrades over wireless links. Over such wireless links, the performance achieved by TCP can be improved through the use of cross-layer algorithms. In this paper, a novel cross-layer approach (Link Layer CLAMP - TCP [L2CLAMP-TCP]) is proposed, which avoids TCP Acknowledgement (ACK) packet transmission over the wireless channel, thereby saving time which can be utilized by the nodes for data packet delivery. The ACK instead is generated by the base station. The congestion measure is also calculated at the base station based on which the receiver advertised window (AWND) is calculated. The performance improvement of the proposed protocol is observed when compared with TCP New Reno and TCP New Reno with CLAMP under normal and error-prone environment.