Performance of TCP Congestion Control in UAV Networks of Various Radio Propagation Models

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently become popular for both recreational and commercial use and UAV networks have thus started to attract the attention of researchers in area of the computer communication and networking. One important topic in UAV networks is congestion control because congestion causes packet losses and delays which result in the waste of all types of network resources such as bandwidth and power. Although there are studies on the performance of TCP congestion control in wireless networks, they focus on terrestrial networks of two dimensions in general. In this paper we study the performance of TCP congestion control in three dimensional UAV networks. In particular, we investigate how TCP congestion control performs in such type of network using various radio propagation models. Our data on the average flow throughput, packet delay, and packet loss rate in UAV networks show that TCP congestion control improves the network performance of UAV networks in general, but it faces challenges when the link losses become severe. Our study thus shows that investigation on new congestion control schemes is stilled needed for the emerging UAV networks.