TCP NCE: A unified solution for non-congestion events to improve the performance of TCP over wireless networks

Abstract

In this article, we propose a unified solution called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for Non-Congestion Events (TCP NCE), to overcome the performance degradation of TCP due to non-congestion events over wireless networks. TCP NCE is capable to reduce the unnecessary reduction of congestion window size and retransmissions caused by non-congestion events such as random loss and packet reordering. TCP NCE consists of three schemes. Detection of non-congestion events (NCE-Detection), Differentiation of non-congestion events (NCE-Differentiation) and Reaction to non-congestion events (NCE-Reaction). For NCE-Detection, we compute the queue length of the bottleneck link using TCP timestamp and for NCE-Differentiation, we utilize the flightsize information of the network with a dynamic delay threshold value. We introduce a new retransmission algorithm called 'Retransmission Delay' for NCE-Reaction which guides the TCP sender to react to non-congestion events by properly triggering the congestion control mechanism. According to the extensive simulation results using qualnet network simulator, TCP NCE acheives more than 70% throughput gain over TCP CERL and more than 95% throughput improvement as compared to TCP NewReno, TCP PR, RR TCP, TCP Veno, and TCP DOOR when the network coexisted with congestion and non-congestion events. Also, we compared the accuracy and fairness of TCP NCE and the result shows significant improvement over existing algorithms in wireless networks.