What does using TCP as an evaluation tool reveal about MANET routing protocols?

  • Authors:

  • Sundaram Rajagopalan;Chien-Chung Shen

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Delaware, Newark, DE;University of Delaware, Newark, DE

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Wireless communications and mobile computing
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Past research studying the operations of TCP over wireless/mobile ad hoc networks has shown that TCP cannot be adopted as-is for use in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) to achieve reasonable performance. This is because the assumptions made during designing TCP were made to make TCP work for wired networks, not MANETs. Consequently, most past research evaluating the performance of MANET routing protocols has concentrated on using CBR traffic over UDP for evaluation. In this paper, we distinguish practical use of TCP from use of TCP for evaluation purposes, and examine whether using TCP as an evaluation tool to evaluate MANET routing protocols will yield any new insights, even though we readily agree with past research that using TCP as-is (that is, as packaged for wired networks) for practical use over MANET is not a good approach. We motivated this idea because even though TCP does not function well over MANET, the fundamental expectations TCP has over the network are "universal" metrics which MANET researchers should strive for as well.Using simulations, we show that by studying the performance of MANET routing protocols using TCP traffic, we obtain a different understanding of the protocols studied, and this understanding cannot be obtained via applying CBR/UDP traffic. In this spirit, we urge MANET routing protocol designers to use TCP as an evaluation tool during the protocol design process.