Delayed Duplicate-Acknowledgements: A proposal to Improve Performance of TCP on Wireless Links
Mehta Miten, Vaidya Nitin · 1998
TCP protocol has been designed and tuned to perform well on wired network where the packet loss is mainly due to congestion. On heterogeneous networks where some links can be wireless, this assumption is no more valid. In this paper, we propose a mechanism which takes advantage of link level retransmissions on wireless link while avoiding interference between link level and TCP retransmissions. The idea is to delay the third and subsequent duplicate acknowledgements for some time, during which the packet may reach receiver wireless host due to local link level retransmissions. In case of packet losses due to corruptions on wireless links, delayed dupack scheme may avoid unnecessary invocation of congestion control mechanisms at the sender. We expect that this scheme may improve performance of TCP over wireless links.