Improving End-to-End Performance of TCP over Mobile Internetworks

Abstract

Reliable tronsport protocols such as TCP use end-toendflow, congestion, and error control mechanisms to provide reliable delivery over an internetwork. However, the end-to-end performance of a TCP connection con suffer significant degradation in the presence of a wireless link. We are exploring alternatives for optimizing end-to-end performance of TCP connections qcross an internetwork consisting of both fixed and mobile networks. The central idea in our opproach is to tronsparently split an end-to-end connection into two separale connections; one over the wireless link and other over the wired poth. The connection over the wireless link mny either use regulor TCP or a specialized transport protocol optimized for better perfornwtnce over o wireless link. Our approach does not require any changes to the existing protocol software on stationary hosts. Results of a systematic performonce evalustion using both our approoch and regular TCP show that our approach yields significant performance improvements.