Explicit congestion notification (ECN) in TCP over wireless network

Abstract

Reliable transport protocols like the transmission control protocol (TCP) are tuned to perform well in traditional wireline networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However, networks with wireless and lossy links also suffer from significant packet losses due to random losses and handoffs. TCP responds to all the packet losses by invoking a congestion control algorithm and this results in degraded end-to-end performance in wireless and lossy links. In this paper, we suggest a strategy to determine the cause of packet drops in a wireless network running the TCP protocol. Our method is based on modification of explicit congestion notification (ECN) in TCP for wireless networks.