A new ATM adaptation layer for TCP/IP over wireless ATM networks

This paper describes the design and performance of a new ATM adaptation layer protocol (AAL‐T) for improving TCP performance over wireless ATM networks. The wireless links are characterized by higher error rates and burstier error patterns in comparison with the fiber links for which ATM was introduced in the beginning. Since the low performance of TCP over wireless ATM networks is mainly due to the fact that TCP always responds to all packet losses by congestion control, the key idea in the design is to push the error control portion of TCP to the AAL layer so that TCP is only responsible for congestion control. The AAL‐T is based on a novel and reliable ARQ mechanism to support quality‐critical TCP traffic over wireless ATM networks. The proposed AAL protocol has been validated using the OPNET tool with the simulated wireless ATM network. The simulation results show that the AAL‐T provides higher throughput for TCP over wireless ATM networks compared to the existing approach of TCP with AAL 5. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

基于模糊逻辑的无线网络流量自适应控制

文章在分析现有提高无线TCP性能方案的基础上，提出一种新的流量控制方法，即基于显式窗口反馈的无线网络流量控制方案。在Snoop中引入有线网络的显示窗口自适应（EWA）算法，通过对BS共享缓存的实时监测，应用模糊控制算法预测当前拥塞窗口（cwnd）的大小，并显式反馈给发送端，使TCP的发送窗口能快速响应网络负荷状况的变化．避免分组的丢失。仿真结果表明．该方法增强了网络对拥塞的自适应性以及对无线信道差错的实时处理能力．提高了网络的吞吐量。     

基于专家控制的无线网络拥塞控制机制的研究

由于无线网络中存在高误码、信号衰落、切换等原因，使得传统TCP的应用受到了挑战。本文提出了将专家控制用于无线网络的拥塞控制方案，它通过推理判断，确定当前的TCP连接状况，进而区分网络拥塞和无线链路差错，然后再针对不同的原因，选取正确的控制策略实施拥塞控制。仿真结果表明，该方法增强了网络对拥塞以及随机差错的实时处理能力，提高了网络的吞吐量，算法本身具有较强的顽健性。     

A TCP acceleration algorithm for a wireless link using rate adaptation based on round-trip-time and virtual receiver window information

Fast transmission control protocol (TCP) was previously proposed for high capacity network environments with long delay, and "FAST TCP with Snoop" performs better than conventional TCP enhancements in mobile wireless network environments. However, FAST TCP has limitations when used over a dynamic mobile wireless link with a high frame error ratio (FER) and frequent delay changes due to the variable rate. We propose an enhanced TCP acceleration algorithm at the TCP sender side which efficiently adapts to the maximum transmission rate of a mobile wireless link using the round trip time (RTT) and virtual receiver window (RWND) information. The proposed algorithm provides superior performance over mobile wireless network environments.     

全IP蜂窝通信系统TCP性能的改进

在无线网络中,造成丢包的主要原因是无线链路的高误码率(BER)及主机在区域间移动。如果TCP的丢包处理简单采用启动拥塞控制机制,势必导致网络传输性能恶化。本文以全IP蜂窝通信系统为例,概述TCP/IP协议组用于无线链路的性能问题,提出解决这些问题的方案,分析该方案的优点和局限性。     

Optimal TCP segment size for mobile server access over wireless links of cellular networks

Internet access from mobile phones over cellular networks suffers from severe bandwidth limitations and high bit error rates over wireless access links. Tailoring TCP connections to best fit the characteristics of this bottleneck link is thus very important for overall performance improvement. In this work, we propose a simple algorithm in deciding the optimal TCP segment size to maximize the utilization of the bottleneck wireless TCP connection for mobile contents server access, taking the dynamic TCP window variation into account. The proposed algorithm can be used when the product of the access rate of the wireless link and the propagation time to mobile contents servers is not large. With some numerical examples, it is shown that the optimal TCP segment size becomes a constant value when the TCP window size (WS) exceeds a threshold. One can set the maximum segment size (MSS) of a wireless TCP connection to this optimal segment size for mobile contents server access for maximum efficiency on the expensive wireless link. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

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.     

Rate-adaptive snoop: a TCP enhancement scheme over rate-controlled lossy links

We study TCP performance over the wireless links deploying a wireless rate-control technique, whose link characteristics are identified by variable link rate and bursty transmission error. We present a TCP enhancement scheme, called rate-adaptive snoop (RA-Snoop). RA-Snoop caches TCP packets selectively based on the wireless channel condition and the cached packets are retransmitted locally over the wireless link in case corruption loss is detected. In addition, for effective adaptation to variable bandwidth, RA-Snoop calculates the window feedback based on the bandwidth-delay product estimation and the queue level, then conveys this feedback information on the receiver's advertised window field in the acknowledgements returning to TCP sources. We compare the performance of RA-Snoop with that of existing schemes in the aspect of goodput and fairness. Results from simulations reveal that RA-Snoop achieves significant improvements over the existing schemes for various traffic scenarios.     

Performance study of link layer and MAC layer protocols to support TCP in 3G CDMA systems

Providing support for TCP with good quality link connection is a key issue for future wireless networks in which Internet access is going to be one of the most important data services. A number of schemes have been proposed in literature to improve the TCP performance over wireless links. In this paper, we study the performance of a particular combination of link layer protocol (e.g., radio link protocol or RLP) and MAC retransmissions to support the TCP connections over third generation (3G) wireless CDMA networks. We specifically investigate two metrics - the packet error rate and the delay provided by RLP and MAC retransmissions - both of which are important for TCP performance. For independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) error channels, we propose an analytical model for RLP performance with MAC retransmission. The segmentation of TCP/IP packets into smaller RLP frames, as well as the RLP buffering process, is modeled using a Markov chain. For correlated fading channels, we introduce an analytical metric called RLP retransmission efficiency. We show that: 1) the RLP frame size has significant impact on the overall 3G system performance, 2) MAC layer retransmissions significantly improve the TCP performance, and 3) the RLP retransmission scheme performs better in highly correlated channels, while other scheme performs better in low correlated channels. Simulation results also confirm these conclusions.     

Throughput analysis of TCP on channels with memory

The focus of this paper is to analyze the relative sensitivity of the bulk throughput performance of different versions of TCP, viz., OldTahoe, Tahoe, Reno, and New Reno, to channel errors that are correlated. We investigate the performance of a single wireless TCP connection in a local environment by modeling the correlated packet loss/error process (e.g., as induced by a multipath fading channel) as a first-order Markov chain. A major contribution of the paper is a unified analytical approach which allows the evaluation of the throughput performance of various versions of TCP. The main findings of this study are that 1) error correlations significantly affect the performance of TCP, and in particular may result in considerably better performance for Tahoe and NewReno; and 2) over slowly fading channels which are characterized by significant channel memory, Tahoe performs as well as NewReno. This leads us to conclude that a clever design of the lower layers that preserve error correlations, naturally present on wireless links because of the fading behavior, could be an attractive alternative to the development or the use of more complex versions of TCP     

Design of coordinator to eliminate redundant local retransmission in wireless networks

Owing to limited bandwidth, high bit error rate, and bursty error in the wireless environment, the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) degrades greatly in wireless networks.Up to now, many researchers have contributed greatly to the wireless TCP field.However, in most of their works, the wireless TCP module usually works in the TCP layer and has no idea of the actual time of the packet transmission, which is determined by the Scheduler in the media access control (MAC) layer, and this will bring the inaccuracy to the local retransmission timeout and induce the redundant local retransmission.In this article, a coordinator is introduced into the base-station (BS), which can provide efficient cooperation between the TCP module and the scheduler module.On the bais of the performance analysis and simulation results, the proposed method is shown to eliminate redundant local retransmission, increase throughput, and improve TCP-level fairness in wireless networks.Moreover, this scheme is orthogonal to those existing wireless TCP schemes, thus it can give great compatibility to the current networks, and further enhance the performance of TCP under the condition that the performance improvement benefiting from the existing approaches will not be affected.     

iTCP: an intelligent TCP with neural network based end-to-end congestion control for ad-hoc multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Maintaining the performance of reliable transport protocols, such as transmission control protocol (TCP), over wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is a challenging problem due to the unique characteristics of data transmission over WMNs. The unique characteristics include multi-hop communication over lossy and non-deterministic wireless mediums, data transmission in the absence of a base station, similar traffic patterns over neighboring mesh nodes, etc. One of the reasons for the poor performance of conventional TCP variants over WMNs is that the congestion control mechanisms in conventional TCP variants do not explicitly account for these unique characteristics. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence based congestion control technique for reliable data transfer over WMNs. The synergy with artificial intelligence is established by exploiting a carefully designed neural network (NN) in the congestion control mechanism. We analyze the proposed NN based congestion control technique in detail and incorporate it into TCP to create a new variant that we name as intelligent TCP or iTCP. We evaluate the performance of iTCP using both ns-2 simulations and real testbed experiments. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed congestion control technique exhibits a significant improvement in total network throughput and average energy consumption per transmitted bit compared to the congestion control techniques used in other TCP variants.     

TCP Performance in IEEE 802.11-Based Ad Hoc Networks with Multiple Wireless Lossy Links

We propose a packet-level model to investigate the impact of channel error on the transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over IEEE-802.11-based multihop wireless networks. A Markov renewal approach is used to analyze the behavior of TCP Reno and TCP Impatient NewReno. Compared to previous work, our main contributions are listed as follows: 1) modeling multiple lossy links, 2) investigating the interactions among TCP, Internet Protocol (IP), and media access control (MAC) protocol layers, specifically the impact of 802.11 MAC protocol and dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol on TCP throughput performance, 3) considering the spatial reuse property of the wireless channel, the model takes into account the different proportions between the interference range and transmission range, and 4) adopting more accurate and realistic analysis to the fast recovery process and showing the dependency of throughput and the risk of experiencing successive fast retransmits and timeouts on the packet error probability. The analytical results are validated against simulation results by using GloMoSim. The results show that the impact of the channel error is reduced significantly due to the packet retransmissions on a per-hop basis and a small bandwidth delay product of ad hoc networks. The TCP throughput always deteriorates less than ~ 10 percent, with a packet error rate ranging from 0 to 0.1. Our model also provides a theoretical basis for designing an optimum long retry limit for IEEE 802.11 in ad hoc networks.     

一种改善TCP性能的cdma2000链路层RLP重传方案

在无线数据传输网络中,物理层帧差错率(FER)是影响网络性能的一个主要因素。无线链路层重传技术是改善网络性能因无线信道误码率较高而下降的一项重要措施。本文主要研究cdma2000无线网络中链路层重传技术对无线TCP数据传输的影响,提出一种cdma2000链路层重传方案,并通过OPNET仿真技术对该重传方案进行仿真,验证了该方案能改善TCP数据在cdma2000无线网络中的传输性能。     

Performance evaluation of a TCP proxy in WCDMA networks

The article addresses the end-to-end performance of TCP in a scenario where WCDMA is used as the access link. In particular, the performance gain that can be achieved by placing a TCP split connection proxy in the WCDMA core network is examined. It is well known that performance enhancing proxies are able to improve the performance of TCP over wireless links that suffer from impairments. However, while previous work on TCP proxies for wireless systems either focused on other wireless systems, like wireless LAN or satellites, or provided a more generic framework, we address in detail the characteristics of a WCDMA access scenario supported by a TCP proxy. The characteristics of WCDMA as perceived by TCP are discussed thoroughly. We argue that the motivation for introducing a proxy is only to overcome problems stemming from a large bandwidth delay product and not to assist local transport layer error recovery at the wireless link. Based on simulations that consider both link layer protocols and TCP, the end-to-end performance for file downloads is investigated. Simulation results show that a proxy can significantly improve performance in the case of high data rates like 384 kb/s. For lower data rates, like 64 and 128 kb/s, it is sufficient to use a well configured TCP implementation.     

Improving TCP/IP Performance over Third-Generation Wireless Networks

As third-generation (3G) wireless networks with high data rate get widely deployed, optimizing the transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over these networks would have a broad and significant impact on data application performance. In this paper, we make two main contributions. First, one of the biggest challenges in optimizing the TCP performance over the 3G wireless networks is adapting to the significant delay and rate variations over the wireless channel. We present window regulator algorithms that use the receiver window field in the acknowledgment (ACK) packets to convey the instantaneous wireless channel conditions to the TCP source and an ACK buffer to absorb the channel variations, thereby maximizing long-lived TCP performance. It improves the performance of TCP selective ACK (SACK) by up to 100 percent over a simple drop-tail policy, with small buffer sizes at the congested router. Second, we present a wireless channel and TCP-aware scheduling and buffer sharing algorithm that reduces the latency of short flows while still exploiting user diversity for a wide range of user and traffic mix.     

A New Approach for Performance Evaluation of TCP over Interference-Limited Wireless Channels

A new metric for performance evaluation of transport control protocol(TCP) over wireless channels based on the interference-limited characteristics of code division multiple address(CDMA) system is proposed. According to the new metric, the performance of TCP over CDMA correlated channel for different protocol parameters and different versions is investigated. The results show that appropriate selection of protocol parameters and packet error rate(PER) operation point can improve significantly the capacity of packet-switched CDMA-based network.     

Performance Modelling of TCP Enhancements in Terrestrial–Satellite Hybrid Networks

In this paper, we focus on the performance of TCP enhancements for a hybrid terrestrial–satellite network. While a large body of literature exists regarding modeling TCP performance for the wired Internet, and recently over a single-hop wireless link, the literature is very sparse on TCP analysis over a hybrid wired–wireless (multi-hop) path. We seek to make a contribution to this problem (where the wireless segment is a satellite uplink) by deriving analytical estimates of TCP throughput for two widely deployed approaches: TCP splitting and E2E (End-to-End) TCP with link layer support as a function of key parameters such as terrestrial/satellite propagation delay, segment loss rate and buffer size. Our analysis is supported by simulations; throughput comparisons indicate superiority of TCP splitting over E2E scheme in most cases. However, in situations where end-to-end delay is dominated by terrestrial portion and buffering is very limited at intermediate node, E2E achieves higher throughput than TCP splitting.     

Internet connection with UMTS

Mobile telecommunication new services are based on data networks specially Internet. These services include http, telnet, ftp, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, etc. Besides, we recognize a mobile network as a multiuser network. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol which is sensitive to link congestion in wireline data links is also used in wireless networks. In order to improve the system performance, the TCP layer uses flow control and congestion control. Besides, radio link control (RLC) and medium access control sublayers have been introduced to compensate the deficiency of TCP layer in wireless environment. RLC has an important role in quality of service enhancement of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). In this paper, we review the protocol stack of UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network which is based on Third-Generation Partnership Project. Then, we evaluate its layer 2 error control mechanisms and verify TCP over automatic repeat request error control mechanism and finally quality of service improvement results from it in fading channels.