Cross-Layer Assisted TCP for Dependable Communications in High-Speed Railway Networks
Jianpeng Xu, Bo Ai, Guowei Shi, Zhangdui D. Zhong, Selvi Lukman, Bagus Juliyanto · 2019
Since the transmission control protocol (TCP) is mainly investigated under static or low speed mobility conditions, providing dependable services in severe high-speed railway (HSR) networks is still plagued by the problems such as high packet loss rate and frequent handover. In the paper, we propose a novel TCP scheme, namely TCP-R, which is inspired by parallel TCP and motivated by lack of a dependable TCP variant over HSR networks. It employs multiple virtual TCP connections instead of a single TCP session, accomplishing much higher network bandwidth utilization rate in HSR networks. Another key ingredient of TCP-R is that it is able to discriminate between wireless losses from congestion losses and act accordingly. Furthermore, we propose cross-layer mechanism between MAC layer and transport layer to ensure service dependability when the high-speed train experiences a handover. We have implemented and evaluated TCP-R in NS3 network simulator and compared its performance with different TCP schemes and state-of-the-art variants including TCP Vero, NewReno, TCP-FIT, TCP Westwood and Cubic. Extensive experiments verify that the throughput, delay and jitter of TCP-R outperform all these variants.