Approaches of wireless TCP enhancement and a new proposal based on congestion coherence

Abstract

TCP is known to have poor performance over unreliable wireless links where packet losses due to transmission errors are misinterpreted as indications of network congestion. TCP enhancements proposed in the literature differ in their signalling and data recovery mechanisms, applicable network configurations, traffic scenarios and locations where required changes are made. In this paper we categorize existing enhancements into several approaches. Motivated by these criteria, we propose a new enhancement that requires only local changes, but applies to a broad range of network and traffic configurations. Comparison with existing algorithm show this new enhancement achieves excellent performance.