End-to-End Loss Based TCP Congestion Control Mechanism as a Secured Communication Technology for Smart Healthcare Enterprises

Abstract

Many smart healthcare centers are deploying long distance, high bandwidth networks in their computer network infrastructure and operation. Transmission control protocol (TCP) is responsible for reliable and secure communication of data in these medial infrastructure networks. TCP is reliable and secure due to its congestion control mechanism, which is responsible for detecting and reacting to the congestion in the network. Many TCP congestion control mechanisms have been developed previously for different operating systems. TCP CUBIC, TCP Compound, and TCP Fusion are the default congestion control mechanism in Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Sun Solaris operating systems, respectively. The earliest congestion control mechanism Standard TCP acts as the trademark congestion control mechanism. The exponential growth of congestion window ( $cwnd$ ) in slow start phase of the TCP CUBIC causes burst losses of packets, and TCP flows did not share available link bandwidth fairly. The prime aim of this paper is to enhance the performance of TCP CUBIC for long distance, high bandwidth secured networks to achieve better performance in medical infrastructure, concerning packet loss rate, protocol fairness, and convergence time. In this paper, congestion control module for slow start is proposed, which reduces the effect of the exponential growth of $cwnd$ by designing the new limits of $cwnd$ size in slow start phase, which in turn decreases the packet loss rate in healthcare networks. NS-2 is used to simulate the experiments of enhanced TCP CUBIC and state-of-the-art congestion control mechanisms. Results show that the performance of enhanced TCP CUBIC outperforms by 18% as compared with the state-of-the-art congestion control mechanisms.