Title: Improving TCP performance over mobile ad hoc networks

Authors: Ahmad Dalal'ah, Samir Bataineh, Awos O. Kan'an

Addresses: Faculty of Computer and Information Technology, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid 22110, Jordan. ' Faculty of Computer and Information Technology, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid 22110, Jordan. ' Faculty of Computer and Information Technology, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid 22110, Jordan

Abstract: The transmission control protocol (TCP) was designed to provide reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. Most TCP implementations have been carefully optimised to operate in wired networks. Deploying standard TCP in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can lead to poor performance of TCP. The main problem that faces TCP in ad hoc networks is its inability to distinguish between packet losses due to congestion and those due to route failures. In order to adapt TCP to MANET environment, several TCP improvements that differentiate between different types of packet losses using explicit notification messages from lower layers have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end technique that does not require any participation from intermediate nodes within the network. The proposed scheme relies on expanding the retransmission timeout (RTO) interval in order to reduce the number of timeouts that do not result from congestion. Simulation results show that our scheme can improve TCP throughput and delay. It outperformed the standard TCP in detailed simulation experiments.

Keywords: mobile ad hoc networks; MANETs; transmission control protocol; TCP; performance; congestion; route; ad-hoc on-demand distance vector; AODV; reliability; wireless networks; retransmission timeout interval; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITST.2010.031476

International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2010 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.137 - 159

Published online: 05 Feb 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article