Congestion or corruption? A strategy for efficient wireless TCP sessions

Abstract

We present a new acknowledgment strategy to improve the performance of TCP sessions that originate or terminate in noisy wireless networks for mobile computers. This acknowledgment strategy allows the TCP source to distinguish between losses due to congestion and losses due to corruption. With this distinction, the source can reduce its sending rate when congestion occurs, and quickly retransmit when corruption occurs. Without this distinction, TCP throughput is shown to suffer significantly over a path with a large bandwidth-delay product. The strategy is also appropriate for dealing with losses due to hand-offs of a mobile computer from one wireless cell to another.