FECTCP for High Error and Large Delay Wireless Networks
Anghel Botos, Zsolt Alfréd Polgár · 2009
Current Internet protocols like TCP have been designed to work well on channels with low channel error rates. Wireless channels on the other hand exhibit high loss rates when compared to wired channels. Under these conditions, current TCP implementations mistake losses due to channel errors as being caused by congestion and as a result the sending rate is unnecessarily reduced leading to a degradation in performance. As a result, a discrimination mechanism between channel loss and congestion loss is needed, in order to make TCP perform better over high error rate links. Unfortunately, the implementation of such mechanisms is complicated by the fact that the congestion control and the loss handling mechanisms in TCP are strongly intertwined. This paper presents an approach for the implementation of a TCP-like transport protocol 1 by using generic rateless erasure correcting codes for the error handling mechanism, thus decoupling it from the congestion control mechanism of the protocol. The congestion control included in the protocol is inspired from current TCP implementations, also containing a discrimination mechanism between channel loss and congestion loss.