Modelling of wireless TCP for short-lived flows

Abstract

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is one of the most important Internet protocols. It provides reliable transport services between two end-hosts. Since TCP performance affects overall network performance, many studies have been done to model TCP performance in the steady state. However, recent researches have shown that most TCP flows are short-lived. Therefore, it is more meaningful to model TCP performance in relation to the initial stage of short-lived flows. In addition, the next-generation Internet will be an unified all-IP network that includes both wireless and wired networks integrated together. In short, modelling short-lived TCP flows in wireless networks constitutes an important axis of research. In this paper, we propose simple wireless TCP models for short-lived flows that extend the existing analytical model proposed in [IEEE Commun. Lett. 2002; 6(2):85–88]. In terms of wireless TCP, we categorized wireless TCP schemes into three types: end-to-end scheme, split connection scheme, and local retransmission scheme, which is similar to the classification proposed in [IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1997; 756–769]. To validate the proposed models, we performed ns-2 simulations. The average differences between the session completion time calculated using the proposed model and the simulation result for three schemes are less than 9, 16, and 7 ms, respectively. Consequently, the proposed model provides a satisfactory means of modelling the TCP performance of short-lived wireless TCP flows. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.