Improving Performance of Rate-Based Transport Protocols in Wireless Environments

L. Magalhães, R. Kravets, A. F. Harris III

DOI: 10.14209/sbrt.2003.789

Evento: XX Simpósio Brasileiro de Telecomunicações (SBrT2003)

Keywords: Wireless Congestion Control Rate-based Transport Protocols

Abstract

Wireless links present higher loss rate than current wired links due to the inherent characteristics of wireless transmission. Lossy environments break the fundamental assumption of current transport protocols that a loss indicates congestion, which results in a reduction in throughput. To avoid changes to the infrastructure, we propose an end-to-end approach to loss discrimination based on network state estimation at the receiver. Discrimination is achieved by correlating the short-term jitter history with anomalous jitter and loss. Through simulation, an experimental rate-based protocol using the discrimination heuristic is compared to a stock TCP and a TCP modified to deal with wireless losses. Our experimental results validate the heuristics and show that better performance can be achieved.

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