A Cross-Layer Approach for Improving TCP Performance in Mobile Environments

Abstract

Network-layer mobility protocols have been developed to keep continuous connectivity for mobile hosts while transparent to the higher layers. However, Due to its distinct characteristics of different from traditional TCP/IP environment, mobility poses substantial impacts on TCP performance in mobile environments. This paper proposes a new cross-layer approach, by introducing a mobility detection element in the network layer which interacts with the transport layer to optimize TCP operations. As changes are only made to the endpoints, this approach preserves the end-to-end semantics of TCP. Different from most exiting works, which utilize either transport or network layer alone without much cross-layer cooperation, our approach allows the use of mobility information in TCP. We analytically compare this approach against existing approaches and show that our approach outperforms prior approaches in terms of effective data resumption time. Through performance simulations, our approach demonstrates that it can effectively improve TCP performance in Mobile IPv6-based mobile environments.