Performance evaluation of fast TCP and TCP Westwood+ for multimedia streaming in wireless environment

Abstract

Although TCP is one of the key protocols of the Internet infrastructure, it is not optimized for either wireless environment or multimedia streaming applications. It fails to meet the service requirement of streaming applications because of its strict adherence to congestion control. Besides, non-congestion packet loss fools TCP to slow down its sending rate over wireless links. Fast TCP and TCP Westwood+ are two well known TCP variants which are supposed to resolve these problems. This paper analyzes the performance of TCP Westwood+ and Fast TCP for various issues in wireless network for multimedia streaming. Simulation results show that, Fast TCP shows better goodput, average throughput, and fairness index but TCP Westwood+ shows less jitter and better performance in presence of heavy reverse flows.