Mobile networking in the Internet
Mobile Networks and Applications - Special issue: mobile networking in the Internet
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TCP is a popular transport protocol used in present-day internet. When packet losses occur, TCP assumes that the packet losses are due to congestion, and responds by reducing its congestion window. When a TCP connection traverses a wireless link, a significant fraction of packet losses may occur due to transmission errors. TCP responds to such losses also by reducing congestion window. This results in unnecessary degradation in TCP performance. We define a class of functions named loss predictors. Loss predictors may be used by a TCP sender to guess whether a particular packet was lost due to congestion or due to wireless transmission errors. Depending on this determination, the TCP sender can take actions appropriate for the actual type of loss. The loss predictors considered in this paper are based on congestion avoidance techniques (CATs) proposed previously. These loss predictors use simple statistics on round-trip times and/or throughput, to determine the cause of a packet loss. An objective of this paper is to investigate the ability of three CAT-based loss predictors to determine the cause of a packet loss. Also, the paper evaluates how these loss predictors react to changes in several network parameters.