Block-switched networks: a new paradigm for wireless transport

  • Authors:
  • Ming Li;Devesh Agrawal;Deepak Ganesan;Arun Venkataramani

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Massachusetts Amherst;University of Massachusetts Amherst

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'09 Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

TCP has well-known problems over multi-hop wireless networks as it conflates congestion and loss, performs poorly over time-varying and lossy links, and is fragile in the presence of route changes and disconnections. Our contribution is a clean-slate design and implementation of a wireless transport protocol, Hop, that uses reliable per-hop block transfer as a building block. Hop is 1) fast, because it eliminates many sources of overhead as well as noisy end-to-end rate control, 2) robust to partitions and route changes because of hop-by-hop control as well as in-network caching, and 3) simple, because it obviates complex end-to-end rate control as well as complex interactions between the transport and link layers. Our experiments over a 20-node multi-hop mesh network show that Hop is dramatically more efficient, achieving better fairness, throughput, delay, and robustness to partitions over several alternate protocols, including gains of more than an order of magnitude in median throughput.