Enhancements of T-REFWA to mitigate link error-related degradations in hybrid wired/wireless networks

Abstract

With the on-going wireless access technologies, the Internet has become accessible anytime anywhere. In wireless networks, link errors significantly degrade the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP). To cope with this issue, this paper improves the recently-proposed terrestrial REFWA (T-REFWA) scheme by adding a new error recovery mechanism to its original design. In the T-REFWA scheme, senders are acknowledged with appropriate sending rates at which an efficient and fair utilization of network resources can be achieved. As the feedback values are computed independently of link errors, senders can keep transmitting data at high rates even in case of link error occurrences. Using this feature, the proposed error recovery mechanism can achieve high throughput in environments with high bit error rates. The throughput is further improved by disabling the exponential backoff algorithm of TCP so that long idle times are avoided in case of link errors. We show through simulations that the proposed method improves TCP performance in high bit error rates. Compared with several TCP variants, the proposed error recovery scheme exhibits higher link utilization and guarantees system fairness for different bit error rates.