Highbrow TCP - a statistical sketch for preventing pauses in wireless transmissions
Hardik K. Molia, Rashmi Agrawal · 2015
The TCP - Transmission Control Protocol at Transport Layer of TCP/IP protocol suite allows bidirectional communication between two end processes, guaranteeing that all the transmitted segments are delivered correctly and in order. TCP supports process to process communication, stream communication, flow control, congestion control and error control. Congestion losses, channel losses and route failure losses are the main reasons of packet losses. Standard TCP considers any packet loss as a part of congestion loss only. Standard TCP performs very well in wired networks where the probability of congestion loss is much higher than of the error loss (channel loss and route failure loss). In MANETs - Mobile Adhoc Networks, due to wireless communication and mobility, channel loss and route failure loss occurs frequently. TCP's misinterpretation between congestion loss and error loss degrades overall performance significantly because of the unnecessary slow down of the sending rate as a part of congestion control even when actually not needed. A novel scheme Highbrow TCP is proposed to improve TCP's performance in MANETs. Highbrow means someone who is intellectual as well as intelligent. Highbrow TCP is intellectual enough to perform statistical analysis of past few RTTs - Round Trip Time values to analyze the network situation. Based on such analysis, Highbrow TCP is intelligent enough to determine how many unacknowledged segment should be retransmitted.