A packet-reordering solution to wireless losses in transmission control protocol

The wireless medium may cause substantial packet losses, rendering Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) inefficient. We propose a cross-layer solution by combining link-layer retransmission techniques and a solution for TCP packet reordering. It is costly to conduct link-layer retransmission with the constraint of orderly packet delivery. We require the link layer to provide reliable packet delivery, but without orderly delivery guarantee, thus transforming the problem of high packet error rates to the problem of packet reordering. The latter is dealt with by enhancing TCP with a solution for packet reordering. We justify our design by analyzing both general scenarios and the case of IEEE 802.11n. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in improving TCP connection goodput in wireless networks.