An efficient approach to improve TCP performance over wireless networks

We propose a new end-to-end flow control scheme we named as "TCP Identification & Revivable Window (TCP-I&RW)" to improve TCP performance in wireless networks supporting link level retransmissions for link errors. The TCP sender in TCP-I&RW places an identification tag for every data segment it sends. Like conventional TCP protocols, if a segment loss is detected, it first infers a congestion, lowers the sending rate and retransmits with a different identification tag. Sender figures out the actual cause of segment loss depending on identification response field in the acknowledgement (ACK) corresponding to the retransmitted data. If the segment loss is not due to congestion, the TCP sender revives its transmission rate to the value prior to the retransmission. As such, erroneous detection of congestion is avoided. This ensures an improved throughput for TCP over wireless links. Experiments show our proposed new scheme can achieve better performance than existing well established schemes in the cellular network and also in the satellite network.