Discriminating congestion losses from wireless losses using inter-arrival times at the receiver

Abstract

We present a simple scheme which enables a TCP receiver to distinguish congestion losses from corruption losses. The scheme works in the case where the last hop to the receiver is a wireless link and has the smallest bandwidth among all links on the connection path. We added our mechanism to TCP-Reno to evaluate the performance improvement. We compared our scheme against Ideal TCP-Reno which is TCP-Reno that can perfectly (but artificially) distinguish between congestion losses and wireless transmission losses. Under favourable conditions, our scheme performs similar to Ideal TCP-Reno and can lead to significant throughput improvement.