Block-switched networks: a new paradigm for wireless transport
Ming Li, Devesh Agrawal, Deepak Ganesan, Arun Venkataramani · 2009
TCP has well-known problems over multi-hop wireless networks as it conflates congestion and loss, performs poorly over time-varying and lossy links, and is fragile in the presence of route changes and disconnections. Our contribution is a clean-slate design and implemen-tation of a wireless transport protocol, Hop, that uses re-liable per-hop block transfer as a building block. Hop is 1) fast, because it eliminates many sources of overhead as well as noisy end-to-end rate control, 2) robust to par-titions and route changes because of hop-by-hop control as well as in-network caching, and 3) simple, because it obviates complex end-to-end rate control as well as com-plex interactions between the transport and link layers. Our experiments over a 20-node multi-hop mesh network show that Hop is dramatically more efficient, achieving better fairness, throughput, delay, and robustness to par-titions over several alternate protocols, including gains of more than an order of magnitude in median throughput. 1