Adjusting the TCP Sending Rate and Retransmissions after Retransmission Timeouts Based on One-Way Queuing Delay in Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is regarded as a viable solution to provide broadband Internet access flexibly and cost efficiently. Improving the performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in WMNs is an active research area in the networking community. The existing solutions proposed for improving the TCP performance has concentrated on differentiating the DATA packet drops in the forward direction induced by both network congestion as well as transmission errors. However, the recent studies show that in WMNs packet drops occur not only in the forward direction but also in the reverse direction particularly due to hidden terminal, hidden capture terminal, link asymmetry etc. The loss of ACK packets in the reverse direction cause frequent retransmission timeouts subject to needless retransmissions and unnecessary slowing down the growth of congestion window, which causes the performance degradation of TCP. In this paper, we introduce a sender side TCP algorithm, called detection of packet loss (DPL), which is capable to distinguish the type of packet drops either DATA or ACKs caused by transmission errors as well as network congestion based on one-way queuing delay and react accordingly. To justify our contributions, we implement DPL in Qualnet simulator and compare its performance against existing TCP solutions via extensive simulations. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately distinguish the type of packet drops whether it is a DATA or ACK caused by transmission error or congestion and can significantly improve the performance under a wide range of scenarios in WMNs.