Wireless TCP model for short-lived flows

Abstract

TCP (transmission control protocol) is one of 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 research has 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 unified all-IP network that includes both wireless and wired networks integrated together. In short, modeling short-lived TCP flows in wireless networks constitutes an important axis of research. In this paper, we propose a simple wireless TCP model for short-lived flows that extends the existing model proposed in [M. Mellia, Feb. 2002]. In terms of wireless TCP, we categorized wireless TCP schemes into three types: end-to-end schemes, split connection schemes, and local retransmission schemes, which is similar to the classification proposed in [H. Balakrishnan et al., Dec. 1997]. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, we performed several simulations. The average differences between the calculated session completion time and the simulation result for three schemes are less than 9 msec, 16 msec, and 7 msec, respectively. Consequently, the proposed model provides a satisfactory means of modeling the TCP performance of short-lived wireless TCP flows.