AN EXPLICIT LOSS AND HANDOFF NOTIFICATION SCHEME IN TCP FOR CELLULAR MOBILE SYSTEM

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile and wireless computing devices, the demand for continuous network connectivity exits for various wired-and-wireless integrated networks. Since Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the standard network protocol for communication on the Interne, any wireless network with Internet service need to be compatible with TCP. TCP is tuned to perform well in traditional wired networks, where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However cellular wireless network suffers from significant losses due to high bit errors and mobile handoff. TCP responds to all losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in degraded end-to-end performance. This paper presents an improved Explicit Loss Notification algorithm to distinguish between packet loss due to congestion and packet loss due to wireless errors and handoffs. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of TCP over cellular wireless network in terms of throughput and congestion window dynamics.