Introducing a New TCP Variant for UAV networks following comparative simulations

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a reliable, connection oriented, congestion control mechanism, currently utilized the majority of both wired and wireless networks at the transport layer. An important function of TCP is the network congestion control mechanism; it governs the packet transmission rate and us enables the protocol to respond to congestion signals. Considering the wide spectrum of requirements stemming from unique network and channel characteristics, there exist numerous variants of TCP. While is commonly utilized in applications requiring reliable and ordered reception of packets, the standard TCP congestion control mechanism demonstrates poor performance in high-mobility wireless networking scenarios, as high mobility implies unreliable radio links and consecutive re-transmissions. In this paper we performed a comparative analysis of a spectrum of TCP variants, with the ultimate goal of deriving best practices to support real-time, yet reliable communication in high-mobility scenarios, with a special focus on aerial mobile ad hoc networks composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Following the findings of this simulation evaluation, we introduce a new TCP variant for Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs), named Swarm HTCP (S-HTCP), which is shown to outperform the other variants in such network conditions.