Analysis and improvement of TCP performance in opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks have attracted attention due to their inherent characteristics, such as long latency, low data rate, and intermittent connectivity. Extensive research has been conducted on opportunistic networks, including the architecture, and routing. However, few in the literature report the performance of TCP in opportunistic networks, especially in the case of Epidemic Routing. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance of TCP in opportunistic networks with Epidemic Routing. Our results show that the Epidemic Routing in opportunistic networks degrades the performance of TCP because multicopy data packets cause duplicate ACKs, and in turn reduce the transmission rate of TCP. Then an enhanced algorithm for TCP, named A-TCP/Reno is proposed to solve the above problem. A-TCP/Reno avoids the duplicate ACK problem caused by Epidemic Routing. The simulation results show that A-TCP/Reno outperforms the TCP/Reno in opportunistic networks with Epidemic Routing protocol.