Extensive Simulation Analysis of TCP Variants for Wireless Communication

Abstract

Since from last decade, there is significant growth in using the wireless networking based communications. The applications like video streaming, audio streaming, and file transfers need the huge bandwidth for wireless data transfer processing. Integrating the higher delay and channel error based wireless networks with the conventional wired networks poses the significant problems to the research group. For wireless networks, the first challenge is consolidating the end to end congestion control. To achieve the congestion control in wireless networks, TCP is the most commonly suggested congestion control method. The TCP protocol was initially designed and used on the wired networks, later the issues of compatibility necessitate its use over wireless networks like MANET, WSN etc. However using the TCP in dynamic wireless networks effectively is a challenging research problem. The wireless network is dynamic in nature without any fixed topology and infrastructure with various data applications. The TCP protocol required to cope up with the mobility and high dynamics of wireless networks. There are several TCP variants reported for wireless networks, in this paper we present the analysis of five such TCP protocols with various wireless communication scenarios. We present the working and evaluation of TCP variants ranging from traditional to recent such as New-Reno, Vegas, Sack, Cubic, and FNC. The simulation results for different network conditions claims the current research problems and future roadmap in the design of TCP protocol for wireless networks.