Performance of multiple TCP connections over different routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Various ad-hoc routing protocols have been proposed in the literature, such as destination sequenced distance vector (DSDV), ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). TCP/IP is the most widely used transport protocol for data services such as file transfer (FTP), e-mail and WWW browsing. For this reason, its use over mobile ad-hoc networks is a certainty. TCP, primarily designed for wireline networks, faces performance degradation when applied to the ad-hoc scenario. Earlier work focussed on comparing the performance of different routing protocols with a single TCP connection. In this paper, we study the performance of multiple TCP connections over various ad-hoc routing protocols. The performance metrics of interest are the TCP throughput and the coefficient of fairness.