A transport layer interoperability model for mobile ad-hoc environment

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic in nature. Links between nodes may constantly change due to mobility. The performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) degrades in such an environment mainly due to its inability to differentiate between congestion and link failures which are frequent in MANETs. Several TCP variants were proposed to adapt TCP to a mobile environment. In addition, other reliable transport protocols were especially designed for MANETs as an alternative to these TCP variants. Several network settings might require different transport protocols to coexist and interoperate. In this paper we present a model that can be used to achieve interoperability between reliable transport protocols. The proposed model consists of forming an intermediate easy-to-implement thin layer between the network layer and the transport layer in the TCP/IP stack. Such layer will be invoked at the receiver side and will preserve the semantics of the sender's transport protocol. Our proposed model focuses on TCP and ATP, the ad-hoc transport protocols, but it can be expanded to accommodate other protocols.