How Bad TCP Suffers from Packet Losses and Delays over Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

The increasing popularity of wireless networks indicates that wireless links will play an important role in future inter-networks. Among the wireless networks, wireless ad hoc networks have been popular because they are very easy to implement without using base stations. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and routing protocols (DSR, DSDV, AODV, etc) as well as link layer protocols are becoming as an essential part of communication between two or more communication hosts. In theory, transport protocols should be independent of the technology of the underlying network layer. However, in practice, TCP, as a standard transport protocol for Internet, is tuned for wired network and performs poorly in wireless networks. Therefore, many researchers invented the different variants of TCP over wired and wireless network. In this paper, we analyze how the variants of TCP suffer from packet losses and average end-to-end delay over each routing protocol, and measure the throughput of received packets in static and mobile ad hoc environments.