Techniques for enhancing the performance of TCP in wireless networks

Abstract

TCP is a connection-oriented and reliable transport layer protocol. Currently, it is most widely used protocol in the Internet. All the reliable Internet applications make use of this protocol. This protocol works well in the wired network, but it does not produce satisfactory results if it is used in the wireless networks. Usage of TCP in wireless networks leads to performance degradation, because it considers all the packets losses as due to congestion and reduces the packet sending rate, and at the same time, it diminishes the network throughput. This feature is suitable for wired networks in which packet loss mainly occurs due to congestion. However, this is inappropriate in wireless networks where packet loss occurs due to signals fading, high bit error rate, hand-off, etc. It misinterprets all packet losses as due to congestion and reduces its congestion window. This misinterpretation of packet loss mainly decreases the throughput. This paper depicts the performance of all the efficient mechanisms which have been developed to improve the performance of TCP.