TCP-probing: towards an error control schema with energy and throughput performance gains

Abstract

Today's universal communications increasingly involve mobile and battety-powered devices (e.g. hand-held, laptop) over wired and wireless networks. Energy eficiency, as well as throughput, are becoming service characteristics of dominant importance in communication protocols. Although standard TCP versions lack the finctionali5 to efficiently adjust their error-control strategies to distinct characteristics of network environments and to specific constraints of communicating devices, the wide range of TCP-based applications have rendered TCP the de facto standard for reliable end-to-end communications. In this work we propose "grafting" two components of strategic significance onto standard TCP: a Probing mechanism and an Immediate Recovery strategy. Our results show that these enhancements yield higher throughput while maintaining lower levels of energy expenditure, and thus have the potential of promoting TCP's congestion control to a universal error-control schema for heterogeneous wiredwireless channels. Furthermore, the enhancements do not damage the end-to-end characteristics of the TCP, nor do they require changes to its semantics: the mechanisms are implemented as option extensions to the TCP header. We compare "TCP-Probing " with Tahoe, Reno, and New Reno, and show that it can be a protocol of choice for heterogeneous wiredwireless communications with respect to energy and throughput performance.

Improving TCP performance over wireless networks

“…Some solutions have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in the heterogeneous network. According to [1], [2],these approaches can be classified into three basic groups: link layer proposals [3], [4], split-connection [5], [6], [7], [8] and end-toend proposals [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]. But, restrictions of these proposals have also been discussed [17].…”

Untitled

“…However, a problem occurred where the TCP's end-to-end semantics and backward compatibility with other regular TCPs were broken. In [7], a delay mechanism employing a probe cycle was used and it preserves backward compatibility, but waiting for the probe cycle is inefficient. In [8], Biaz encountered a problem when attempting to modify both the TCP sender and receiver.…”

Dynamic parameter adjustment for available-bandwidth estimation of TCP in wired–wireless networks

“…A number of studies have been done to improve TCP throughput performance in wired-wireless network environment [5-11, 13-15, 19, 26, 29, 33-35, 39, 41]. The approaches to improve TCP performance in wireless network can be classified into the following: (1) link-layer protocols [4,13,20,[23][24][25], (2) split-connection protocols [5,6,11,16,17,41], (3) snoop protocols [7,9,33] and (4) end-to-end protocols [10,15,19,26,27,34,35,39,40]. We summarize these studies in the next section.…”