Use of TCP Decoupling in Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Networks

Abstract

We propose using the TCP decoupling approach to improve a TCP connection's goodput over wireless networks. The performance improvement can be analytically shown to be proportional to $$\sqrt {{\text{MTU/HP\_Sz}}} $$ , where MTU is the maximum transmission unit of participating wireless links and HP_Sz is the size of a packet containing only a TCP/IP header. For example, on a WaveLAN [32] wireless network, where MTU is 1500 bytes and HP_Sz is 40 bytes, the achieved goodput improvement is about 350%. We present experimental results demonstrating that TCP decoupling outperforms TCP reno and TCP SACK. These results confirm the analysis of $$\sqrt {{\text{MTU/HP\_Sz}}} $$ performance improvement.