TCP with sender assisted delayed acknowledgement — A novel ACK thinning scheme

Abstract

TCP - Transmission Control Protocol acts as a logical vehicle for process to process communication. TCP ensures reliability in the form of flow control, error control and congestion control via ACK-Acknowledgement based transmissions. Wireless networks have limited spatial reuse scope which limits amount of data that can be in transmission within a specific geographical area at a time. In such scenarios collision is one of the most critical link layer issues which affects overall performance. Inter flow collision occurs among more than one independent TCP connections while Intra flow collision occurs inside a single TCP connection between data flow and ACK flow. ACK Thinning is a process of reducing the rate of ACKs to spare more communication space - bandwidth for the Data flow inside a single TCP connection. This paper introduces an enhanced ACK Thinning scheme SADA - Sender Assisted Delayed Acknowledgement for MANETs. The scheme has been implemented in NS 2.35.