A simple model for TCP loss recovery performance over wireless networks

Abstract

There have been a lot of approaches to evaluate and predict transmission control protocol (TCP) performance in a numerical way. Especially, under the recent advance in wireless transmission technology, the issue of TCP performance over wireless links has come to surface. It is because TCP responds to all packet losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in degraded end-to-end performance in wireless and lossy systems. By several previous works, although it has been already proved that overall TCP performance is largely dependent on its loss recovery performance, there have been few works to try to analyze TCP loss recovery performance with thoroughness. In this paper, therefore, we focus on analyzing TCP's loss recovery performance and have developed a simple model that facilitates to capture the TCP sender's behaviors during loss recovery period. Based on the developed model, we can derive the conditions that packet losses may be recovered without retransmission timeout (RTO). Especially, we have found that TCP Reno can retransmit three packet losses by fast retransmits in a specific situation. In addition, we have proved that successive three packet losses and more than four packet losses in a window always invoke RTO easily, which is not considered or approximated in the previous works. Through probabilistic works with the conditions derived, the loss recovery performance of TCP Reno can be quantified in terms of the number of packet losses in a window.