On the use of loss history for performance improvement of TCP over wireless networks

Due to the fast advances in wireless networking technology, there is an increasing number of hosts using TCP/IP to connect to the Internet via wireless links. However, it is known that TCP performs poorly on paths with wireless links. This paper presents an approach to address the problem. In the proposed approach, a sender controls the size of transmitted packets and observes the number of losses for each of the controlled packet sizes. It then estimates the number of congestion losses and random losses separately. The results are used to decide whether to reduce the window size or not when a packet loss is detected. We use ns-2 simulator to evaluate the proposed approach. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is able to achieve between 25% and 150% better throughput than FACK under the byte-error rate range of 5 × 10^-5 to 20 × 10^-5.