Bettering TCP performance of transient mobile nodes in 802.11 networks by ACK caching

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol is the most widely used transport layer protocol in wired networks accounting to 95% of the Internet traffic. On wireless networks, TCP demands special focus. The TCP source in the wired domain is unaware of the vagaries of the lossy wireless domain and starts reducing the congestion window, which is the normal flow control mechanism of TCP. But this leads to a considerable degradation in TCP Performance in 802.11 WLAN networks. To address this issue, we propose a model which involves no change to the transient mobile node and to the wired host sending the Internet traffic. TCP performance is improved by introducing a cross-layer scheme accompanied by a buffer to cache ACKs and TCP packets. Then we have studied t he TCP performance improvement in four of the TCP congestion control algorithms - NewReno and Linux. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.