A Study of Improved Approaches for TCP Congestion Control in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The conventional TCP was designed to wired networks on the assumption that the loss of data packet caused by network congestion, but in ad hoc networks, a large number of data packet loss due to high BER(bits error rate), nodes mobility, etc. At a consequence, The conventional TCP congestion control mechanisms are not appropriate for the wireless ad hoc networks and to large extent reduces the network performance. In this paper, we analyze the major factors affecting TCP performance in ad hoc networks, give several typical improved congestion control approaches, and compare the network performance of these different approaches. The simulation results show that the cross-layer optimal Congestion Control approach outperforms other improved approaches and achieves higher fairness and throughput in ad hoc networks.