Enhancing TCP congestion control for improved performance in wireless networks

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) designed to deliver seamless and reliable end-to-end data transfer across unreliable networks works impeccably well in wired environment. However, when introduced to wireless networks, TCP performance degrades significantly due to the unpredictable nature of wireless environment and the subsequent loss of packets. TCP congestion window (cwnd) is considerably reduced because of the ensuing congestion control mechanisms thereby affecting TCP performance critically. In this paper, we propose changes to improve TCP performance by keeping congestion window as large as possible during the various phases of congestion control mechanism. We evaluate the performance using OPNET simulations and show how it fares against the widespread TCP Reno. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.