Abstract
Opportunistic data forwarding significantly increases the throughput in multi-hop wireless mesh networks by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions and the fluctuation of link qualities. Network coding strengthens the robustness of data transmissions over unreliable wireless links. However, opportunistic data forwarding and network coding are rarely incorporated with TCP because the frequent occurrences of out-of-order packets in opportunistic data forwarding and long decoding delay in network coding overthrow TCP’s congestion control. In this paper, we propose a solution dubbed TCPFender, which supports opportunistic data forwarding and network coding in TCP. Our solution adds an adaptation layer to mask the packet loss caused by wireless link errors and provides early positive feedbacks to trigger a larger congestion window for TCP. This adaptation layer functions over the network layer and reduces the delay of ACKs for each coded packet. The simulation results show that TCPFender significantly outperforms TCP/IP in terms of the network throughput in different topologies of wireless networks.
Highlights
Wireless mesh networks have emerged as the most common technology for the last mile of Internet access
Since Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was originally designed primarily for wired networks that have low bit error rates, moderate packet loss, and packet collisions, the performance of TCP degrades to a greater extent in multi-hop wireless networks, where several unreliable wireless links may be involved in data transmissions (Aguayo et al, 2004; Jain & Das, 2005)
The link quality variation in multi-hop wireless networks is widely studied in the opportunistic data forwarding under User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
Summary
Wireless mesh networks have emerged as the most common technology for the last mile of Internet access. How to cite this article Zhang et al (2016), TCP adaptation with network coding and opportunistic data forwarding in multi-hop wireless networks. TCP is required to transmit continuously to overcome these packets losses As a result, such a problem causes poor performance in multi-hop wireless networks. The link quality variation in multi-hop wireless networks is widely studied in the opportunistic data forwarding under User Datagram Protocol (UDP). It was traditionally treated as an adversarial factor in wireless networks, where its effect must be masked from upper-layer protocols by automatic retransmissions or strong forwarding error corrections. Our proposed protocol, called TCPFender, uses opportunistic data forwarding and network coding to improve TCP throughputs. Since our work adapts the TCPFender to functioning over the network layer without any modification to TCP itself, it is easy to deploy in wireless mesh networks
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