Distributed tcp caching for wireless sensor networks
Adam Dunkels, Juan Alonso, Thiemo Voigt, Hartmut Ritter · 2004
Abstract — Many applications of wireless sensor networks are useful only when connected to an external network. Previous research on transport layer protocols for sensor networks has focused on designing protocols specifically targeted for sensor networks. The deployment of TCP/IP in sensor networks would, however, enable direct connection between the sensor network and external TCP/IP networks. In this paper we focus on the performance of TCP in the context of wireless sensor networks. TCP is known to exhibit poor performance in wireless environments, both in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. To overcome these problems we introduce a mechanism called Distributed TCP Caching (DTC). The DTC mechanism uses segment caching and local retransmissions to avoid expensive end-to-end retransmissions. We show by simulation that DTC significantly improves TCP performance so that TCP can be useful even in wireless sensor networks. I.