TCP-Jersey for wireless IP communications

Improving the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless Internet protocol (IP) communications has been an active research area. The performance degradation of TCP in wireless and wired-wireless hybrid networks is mainly due to its lack of the ability to differentiate the packet losses caused by network congestions from the losses caused by wireless link errors. In this paper, we propose a new TCP scheme, called TCP-Jersey, which is capable of distinguishing the wireless packet losses from the congestion packet losses, and reacting accordingly. TCP-Jersey consists of two key components, the available bandwidth estimation (ABE) algorithm and the congestion warning (CW) router configuration. ABE is a TCP sender side addition that continuously estimates the bandwidth available to the connection and guides the sender to adjust its transmission rate when the network becomes congested. CW is a configuration of network routers such that routers alert end stations by marking all packets when there is a sign of an incipient congestion. The marking of packets by the CW configured routers helps the sender of the TCP connection to effectively differentiate packet losses caused by network congestion from those caused by wireless link errors. This paper describes the design of TCP-Jersey, and presents results from experiments using the NS-2 network simulator. Results from simulations show that in a congestion free network with 1% of random wireless packet loss rate, TCP-Jersey achieves 17% and 85% improvements in goodput over TCP-Westwood and TCP-Reno, respectively; in a congested network where TCP flow competes with VoIP flows, with 1% of random wireless packet loss rate, TCP-Jersey achieves 9% and 76% improvements in goodput over TCP-Westwood and TCP-Reno, respectively. Our experiments of multiple TCP flows show that TCP-Jersey maintains the fair and friendly behavior with respect to other TCP flows.     

TCP-DCR: a novel protocol for tolerating wireless channel errors

This paper presents TCP-DCR, a set of simple modifications to the TCP protocol to improve its robustness to channel errors in wireless networks. TCP-DCR is based on the simple idea of allowing the link-level mechanism to recover the packets lost, due to channel errors, thereby limiting the response of the transport protocol to mostly congestion losses. This is done by delaying the triggering of congestion response algorithms for a small bounded period of time /spl tau/ to allow the link-level retransmissions to recover the loss due to channel errors. If at the end of the delay /spl tau/ the packet is not recovered, then it is treated as a packet lost due to congestion. We analyze TCP-DCR to show that the delay in congestion response does not impact the fairness towards the native implementations of TCP that respond to congestion immediately after receiving three dupacks. We evaluate TCP-DCR through simulations to show that it offers significantly better performance when channel errors contribute more towards packet losses in the network with no or minimal impact on the performance when congestion is the primary cause for packet loss. We also present an analysis to show that the number of flows in the network significantly influences protocol evaluation in the wireless networks.     

Modeling TCP SACK performance over wireless channels with semi-reliable ARQ/FEC

Providing reliable data communications over wireless channels is a challenging task because time-varying wireless channel characteristics often lead to bit errors. These errors result in loss of IP packets and, consequently, TCP segments encapsulated into these packets. Since TCP cannot distinguish packet losses due to bit corruption from those due to network congestion, any packet loss caused by wireless channel impairments leads to unnecessary execution of the TCP congestion control algorithms and, hence, sub-optimal performance. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) try to improve communication reliability and reduce packet losses by detecting and recovering corrupted bits. Most analytical models that studied the effect of ARQ and FEC on TCP performance assumed that the ARQ scheme is perfectly persistent (i.e., completely reliable), thus a frame is always successfully transmitted irrespective of the number of transmission attempts it takes. In this paper, we develop an analytical cross-layer model for a TCP connection running over a wireless channel with a semi-reliable ARQ scheme, where the amount of transmission attempts is limited by some number. The model allows to evaluate the joint effect of stochastic properties of the wireless channel characteristics and various implementation-specific parameters on TCP performance, which makes it suitable for performance optimization studies. The input parameters include the bit error rate, the value of the normalized autocorrelation function of bit error observations at lag 1, the strength of the FEC code, the persistency of ARQ, the size of protocol data units at different layers, the raw data rate of the wireless channel, and the bottleneck link buffer size.     

Delayed duplicate acknowledgements: a TCP‐Unaware approach to improve performance of TCP over wireless

Since a TCP sender cannot distinguish between packet losses arising from transmission errors from those due to congestion, TCP tends to perform poorly on wireless links that are prone to transmission errors. Several techniques have previously been proposed to improve TCP performance over wireless links. Existing schemes typically require an intermediate node (typically, a base station) to be TCP‐aware. For instance, the Snoop scheme requires the base station to interpret TCP headers and take appropriate action to help improve TCP performance. This paper proposes an alternative TCP‐unaware technique that attempts to mimic the behavior of the Snoop protocol. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed Delayed Dupacks scheme performs quite well. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving TCP performance in mobile networks

In this letter, a new transport layer mechanism is proposed to improve the performance of transport control protocol (TCP) in mobile networks. The proposed mechanism is comprised of two parts: a loss classifier (LC) and a congestion window extrapolator (CWE). Based on LC, the cause of packet loss during roaming is determined. If the loss is considered to be caused by congestion in the wireline, the congestion window is halved; otherwise, the packet is considered to be lost in the last hop, the wireless portion, and the sender adjusts the size of the congestion window based on CWE. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. The results show that our mechanism significantly improves TCP performance as compared with existing solutions for mobile networks.     

Enhancing Fairness and Throughput of TCP in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Most of the recent research on TCP over heterogeneous wireless networks has concentrated on differentiating between packet drops caused by congestion and link errors, to avoid significant throughput degradations due to the TCP sending window being frequently shut down, in response to packet losses caused not by congestion but by transmission errors over wireless links. However, TCP also exhibits inherent unfairness toward connections with long round-trip times or traversing multiple congested routers. This problem is aggravated by the difference of bit-error rates between wired and wireless links in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we apply the TCP Bandwidth Allocation (TBA) algorithm, which we have proposed previously, to improve TCP fairness over heterogeneous wireless networks with combined wireless and wireline links. To inform the sender when congestion occurs, we propose to apply Wireless Explicit Congestion Notification (WECN). By controlling the TCP window behavior with TBA and WECN, congestion control and error-loss recovery are effectively separated. Further enhancement is also incorporated to smooth traffic bursts. Simulation results show that not only can the combined TBA and WECN mechanism improve TCP fairness, but it can maintain good throughput performance in the presence of wireless losses as well. A salient feature of TBA is that its main functions are implemented in the access node, thus simplifying the sender-side implementation.     

TCP在无线通信中存在的问题及解决方案

TCP和IP协议非常简单且可靠,它们的组合决定了目前的大多数通信方式(从有线骨干网到混合网)。TCP协议最初是为有线网络而设计的,目前已成为大多数应用事实上的标准。在有线网络中随机比特差错率可以忽略,拥塞主要由包丢失造成。很多研究都表明未修改的TCP协议在无线环境中的性能很差,因为它无法区分数据包的丢失是由于拥塞还是传输差错造成的。文章分析了TCP在无线IP通信中存在的问题,详细给出了相应的解决方案。     

Hierarchical cache design for enhancing TCP over heterogeneous networks with wired and wireless links

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks made up of links with low bit-error rates. Networks with higher bit-error rates, such as those with wireless links and mobile hosts, violate many of the assumptions made by the transmission control protocol (TCP), causing degraded end-to-end performance. We propose a two-layer hierarchical cache architecture for enhancing TCP performance over heterogeneous networks with both wired and wireless links. A new network-layer protocol, called new snoop (NS), is designed. The main idea is to cache the unacknowledged packets at both the mobile switch center (MSC) and base station (BS), to form a two-layer cache hierarchy. If a packet is lost due to transmission errors in the wireless link, the BS takes the responsibility to recover the loss. When a handoff occurs, the packets cached at the MSC can help to minimize the latency of retransmissions due to temporal disconnection. NS can preserve the end-to-end TCP semantics and is compatible with existing TCP applications. Its implementation only requires code modification at the BS and MSC. Simulation results show that NS is significantly more robust in dealing with unreliable wireless links and handoffs as compared with the original snoop scheme, as well as some other existing TCP enhancements.     

Enhancement of TCP over wired/wireless networks with packet loss classifiers inferred by supervised learning

TCP is suboptimal in heterogeneous wired/wireless networks because it reacts in the same way to losses due to congestion and losses due to link errors. In this paper, we propose to improve TCP performance in wired/wireless networks by endowing it with a classifier that can distinguish packet loss causes. In contrast to other proposals we do not change TCP’s congestion control nor TCP’s error recovery. A packet loss whose cause is classified as link error will simply be ignored by TCP’s congestion control and recovered as usual, while a packet loss classified as congestion loss will trigger both mechanisms as usual. To build our classification algorithm, a database of pre-classified losses is gathered by simulating a large set of random network conditions, and classification models are automatically built from this database by using supervised learning methods. Several learning algorithms are compared for this task. Our simulations of different scenarios show that adding such a classifier to TCP can improve the throughput of TCP substantially in wired/wireless networks without compromizing TCP-friendliness in both wired and wireless environments.     

Reorder notifying TCP (RN‐TCP) with explicit packet drop notification (EPDN)

Numerous studies have shown that packet reordering is common, especially in networks where there is high degree of parallelism and different link speeds. Reordering of packets decrease the TCP performance of a network, mainly because it leads to overestimation of the congestion in the network. In this paper, we analyse the performance of networks when reordering of packets occur. We propose a proactive solution that could significantly improve the performance of the network when reordering of packets occurs. We report results of our simulation experiments, which support this claim. Our solution is based on enabling the senders to distinguish between dropped packets and reordered packets. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TCP Veno: TCP enhancement for transmission over wireless access networks

Wireless access networks in the form of wireless local area networks, home networks, and cellular networks are becoming an integral part of the Internet. Unlike wired networks, random packet loss due to bit errors is not negligible in wireless networks, and this causes significant performance degradation of transmission control protocol (TCP). We propose and study a novel end-to-end congestion control mechanism called TCP Veno that is simple and effective for dealing with random packet loss. A key ingredient of Veno is that it monitors the network congestion level and uses that information to decide whether packet losses are likely to be due to congestion or random bit errors. Specifically: (1) it refines the multiplicative decrease algorithm of TCP Reno-the most widely deployed TCP version in practice-by adjusting the slow-start threshold according to the perceived network congestion level rather than a fixed drop factor and (2) it refines the linear increase algorithm so that the connection can stay longer in an operating region in which the network bandwidth is fully utilized. Based on extensive network testbed experiments and live Internet measurements, we show that Veno can achieve significant throughput improvements without adversely affecting other concurrent TCP connections, including other concurrent Reno connections. In typical wireless access networks with 1% random packet loss rate, throughput improvement of up to 80% can be demonstrated. A salient feature of Veno is that it modifies only the sender-side protocol of Reno without changing the receiver-side protocol stack.     

Corruption‐aware adaptive increase and adaptive decrease algorithm for TCP error and congestion controls in wireless networks

The conventional TCP tends to suffer from performance degradation due to packet corruptions in the wireless lossy channels, since any corruption event is regarded as an indication of network congestion. This paper proposes a TCP error and congestion control scheme using corruption‐aware adaptive increase and adaptive decrease algorithm to improve TCP performance over wireless networks. In the proposed scheme, the available network bandwidth is estimated based on the amount of the received integral data as well as the received corrupted data. The slow start threshold is updated only when a lost but not corrupted segment is detected by sender, since the corrupted packets still arrive at the TCP receiver. In the proposed scheme, the duplicated ACKs are processed differently by sender depending on whether there are any lost but not corrupted segments at present. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme could significantly improve TCP throughput over the heterogeneous wired and wireless networks with a high bit error rate, compared with the existing TCP and its variants. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross-layer TCP with bitmap error recovery scheme in wireless ad hoc networks

Current TCP is not able to distinguish corruption losses from packet loss events. Hence, high transmission errors and varying inherent latency within a wireless network would cause seriously adverse effects to TCP performance. To improve TCP in IEEE 802.11 multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks, this study proposes an error recovery mechanism based on coordination of TCP and IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. The simulation results confirm that the proposed error recovery approach could provide a more efficient solution for frequent transmission losses, and enable TCP to distinguish between congestion errors and transmission errors, and thus, to respond with proper remedial actions.     

Cross‐layer design to improve elastic traffic performance in WLANs

In this paper, we are interested in improving TCP flow performance when a short loss of 802.11 signal leads to losing segments and triggers inappropriately TCP congestion control mechanisms. A set of measurements in a common wireless environment with signal losses due to mobility or interference is made to highlight the distinct MAC and TCP loss recovery levels and the lack of interactions between them. Initially, we demonstrate the interest of adapting the 802.11 MAC layer Retry Limit parameter in the case of signal losses due to distance or obstacles (mobility). Thus, a first‐level loss differentiation algorithm (LDA) acting at the MAC layer is proposed to improve TCP flow performance in the case of segment losses due to mobility. Hence, for a signal failure, the MAC layer reacts consequently by dynamically adapting the Retry Limit parameter. This adaptation allows avoiding a costly end‐to‐end TCP loss recovery. Segment losses due to interference are differentiated from those due to congestion through the use of a second‐level LDA. The latter is a cross‐layer LDA acting at the TCP layer but using a specific 802.11 parameter, the AckFailureCount, to realize the targeted loss differentiation. The TCP NewReno version is then adapted in order to integrate the cross‐layer LDA results and to avoid reducing the TCP congestion window unsuitably. The efficiency and completeness of a solution integrating both LDA schemes is then discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adjusting the TCP Sending Rate and Retransmissions after Retransmission Timeouts Based on One-Way Queuing Delay in Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is regarded as a viable solution to provide broadband Internet access flexibly and cost efficiently. Improving the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in WMNs is an active research area in the networking community. The existing solutions proposed for improving the TCP performance has concentrated on differentiating the DATA packet drops in the forward direction induced by both network congestion as well as transmission errors. However, the recent studies show that in WMNs packet drops occur not only in the forward direction but also in the reverse direction particularly due to hidden terminal, hidden capture terminal, link asymmetry etc. The loss of ACK packets in the reverse direction cause frequent retransmission timeouts subject to needless retransmissions and unnecessary slowing down the growth of congestion window, which causes the performance degradation of TCP. In this paper, we introduce a sender side TCP algorithm, called detection of packet loss (DPL), which is capable to distinguish the type of packet drops either DATA or ACKs caused by transmission errors as well as network congestion based on one-way queuing delay and react accordingly. To justify our contributions, we implement DPL in Qualnet simulator and compare its performance against existing TCP solutions via extensive simulations. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately distinguish the type of packet drops whether it is a DATA or ACK caused by transmission error or congestion and can significantly improve the performance under a wide range of scenarios in WMNs.     

TCP Westwood: End-to-End Congestion Control for Wired/Wireless Networks

TCP Westwood (TCPW) is a sender-side modification of the TCP congestion window algorithm that improves upon the performance of TCP Reno in wired as well as wireless networks. The improvement is most significant in wireless networks with lossy links. In fact, TCPW performance is not very sensitive to random errors, while TCP Reno is equally sensitive to random loss and congestion loss and cannot discriminate between them. Hence, the tendency of TCP Reno to overreact to errors. An important distinguishing feature of TCP Westwood with respect to previous wireless TCP extensions is that it does not require inspection and/or interception of TCP packets at intermediate (proxy) nodes. Rather, TCPW fully complies with the end-to-end TCP design principle. The key innovative idea is to continuously measure at the TCP sender side the bandwidth used by the connection via monitoring the rate of returning ACKs. The estimate is then used to compute congestion window and slow start threshold after a congestion episode, that is, after three duplicate acknowledgments or after a timeout. The rationale of this strategy is simple: in contrast with TCP Reno which blindly halves the congestion window after three duplicate ACKs, TCP Westwood attempts to select a slow start threshold and a congestion window which are consistent with the effective bandwidth used at the time congestion is experienced. We call this mechanism faster recovery. The proposed mechanism is particularly effective over wireless links where sporadic losses due to radio channel problems are often misinterpreted as a symptom of congestion by current TCP schemes and thus lead to an unnecessary window reduction. Experimental studies reveal improvements in throughput performance, as well as in fairness. In addition, friendliness with TCP Reno was observed in a set of experiments showing that TCP Reno connections are not starved by TCPW connections. Most importantly, TCPW is extremely effective in mixed wired and wireless networks where throughput improvements of up to 550% are observed. Finally, TCPW performs almost as well as localized link layer approaches such as the popular Snoop scheme, without incurring the overhead of a specialized link layer protocol.     

A Novel Congestion Detection Scheme in TCP Over OBS Networks

This paper introduces a novel congestion detection scheme for high-bandwidth TCP flows over optical burst switching (OBS) networks, called statistical additive increase multiplicative decrease (SAIMD). SAIMD maintains and analyzes a number of previous round-trip time (RTTs) at the TCP senders in order to identify the confidence with which a packet loss event is due to network congestion. The confidence is derived by positioning short-term RTT in the spectrum of long-term historical RTTs. The derived confidence corresponding to the packet loss is then taken in the developed policy for TCP congestion window adjustment. We will show through extensive simulation that the proposed scheme can effectively solve the false congestion detection problem and significantly outperform the conventional TCP counterparts without losing fairness. The advantages gained in our scheme are at the expense of introducing more overhead in the SAIMD TCP senders. Based on the proposed congestion control algorithm, a throughput model is formulated, and is further verified by simulation results.      

Performance improvement of TCP in ad hoc networks by mitigating channel contention

In ad hoc networks, the spatial reuse property limits the number of packets which can be spatially transmitted over a path. In standard Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), however, a TCP sender keeps transmitting packets without taking into account this property. This causes heavy contention for the wireless channel, resulting in the performance degradation of TCP flows. Hence, two techniques have been proposed independently in order to reduce the contention. First, a TCP sender utilizes a congestion window limit (CWL), by considering the spatial reuse property. This prevents the TCP sender from transmitting more than CWL number of packets at one time. Second, a delayed ack (DA) strategy is exploited in order to mitigate the contention between the TCP ACK and DATA packets. Recently, although TCP‐DAA (Dynamic Adaptive Acknowledgment) attempts to utilize a CWL‐based DA strategy, TCP‐DAA overlooks a dynamic correlation between these two techniques. This paper, therefore, reveals the dynamic correlation and also proposes a protocol which not only reduces the frequency of the TCP ACK transmissions but also determines a CWL value dynamically, according to network conditions. Simulation studies show that our protocol performs the best in various scenarios, as compared to TCP‐DAA and standard TCP (such as TCP‐NewReno). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Novel Wireless TCP and its Steady State Throughput Model

1　Introduction　WiththegrowthofwirelessnetworksandtheInter net,thedatatransmissionserviceoverwirelessnet worksbecomesmoreattractive .InthecurrentInternet,TCPiswidelyusedinpopularapplicationslikeTelnet,FTP ,andHTTP .　TCPisareliableconnection oriented protocolthatimplementscongestioncontrolbymeansofaslidingwindowalgorithm .TCPTahoeandReno[1～ 2 ] ,whichmakeuseoftheSlowStart (SS)andCongestionAvoid ance (CA)algorithmstoadjustthewindowsize ,havegotmuchsuccessintheInternet.Inparticular…     

An Adaptive Delayed Acknowledgment Strategy to Improve TCP Performance in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

In multi-hop wireless networks, transmission control protocol (TCP) suffers from performance deterioration due to poor wireless channel characteristics. Earlier studies have shown that the small TCP acknowledgments consume as much wireless resources as the long TCP data packets. Moreover, generating an acknowledgment (ACK) for each incoming data packet reduces the performance of TCP. The main factor affecting TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks is the contention and collision between ACK and data packets that share the same path. Thus, lowering the number of ACKs using the delayed acknowledgment option defined in IETF RFC 1122 will improve TCP performance. However, large cumulative ACKs will induce packet loss due to retransmission time-out at the sender side of TCP. Motivated by this understanding, we propose a new TCP receiver with an adaptive delayed ACK strategy to improve TCP performance in multi-hop wireless networks. Extensive simulations have been done to prove and evaluate our strategy over different topologies. The simulation results demonstrate that our strategy can improve TCP performance significantly.