A receiver-centric transport protocol for mobile hosts with heterogeneous wireless interfaces

Abstract

Numerous transport protocols have been proposed in related work for use by mobile hosts over wireless environments. A common theme among the design of such protocols is that they specifically address the distinct characteristics of the last-hop wireless link, such as random wireless errors, round-trip time variations, blackouts, handoffs, etc. In this paper, we argue that due to the defining role played by the wireless link on a connection's performance, locating the intelligence of a transport protocol at the mobile host that is adjacent to the wireless link can result in distinct performance advantages. To this end, we present a receiver-centric transport protocol called RCP (Reception Control Protocol) that is a TCP clone in its general behavior, but allows for better congestion control, loss recovery, and power management mechanisms compared to sender-centric approaches. More importantly, in the context of recent trends where mobile hosts are increasingly being equipped with multiple interfaces providing access to heterogeneous wireless networks, we show that a receiver-centric protocol such as RCP can enable a powerful and comprehensive transport layer solution for such multi-homed hosts. Specifically, we describe how RCP can be used to provide: (i) a scalable solution to support interface specific congestion control for a single active connection; (ii) seamless server migration capability during handoffs; and (iii) effective bandwidth aggregation when receiving data through multiple interfaces, either from one server, or from multiple replicated servers. We use both packet level simulations, and real Internet experiments to evaluate the proposed protocol.

Providing explicit congestion control and multi-homing support for content-centric networking transport

“…In addition, several transport layer protocols [11,12,16] are proposed to realize bandwidth aggregation for multi-homed hosts in the Internet. They propose an end-to-end transport approach in which either the sender [12,16] or the receiver [11] maintains multiple transport pipes/subconnections, one for each interface.…”

“…They propose an end-to-end transport approach in which either the sender [12,16] or the receiver [11] maintains multiple transport pipes/subconnections, one for each interface. We extend CHoPCoP to a parallelized version by borrowing some of their mechanisms.…”

Designing a rate-based transport protocol for wired-wireless networks

“…There have been several proposals to optimize TCP for wireless networks [2]- [9]. Some of these solutions [2], [3] try to maintain the semantics of TCP congestion control by hiding transmission losses from the end hosts by modifying the underlying infrastructure.…”

“…Thus, jitter is governed by the difference in packet travel time. Now assuming that propagation time is constant for all packets, the only variant is the queuing time as shown in Equation (9). A varying queuing time (measured as jitter at the destination) can be used as an indicator of network congestion.…”

A receiver-centric rate control scheme for layered video streams in the Internet

“…The protocol employs a receiver-centric congestion control mechanism and does not rely on QoS functionality in routers, such as Random Early Drop (RED), ECN or other Active Queue Management mechanisms. Inline with Hsieh et al (2003), Rhee et al (2000) and Tsaoussidis and Zhang (2002), certain protocol functionalities can be moved from the sender to the receiver. The sender merely acts based on the requests from the receiver.…”