On protocol engineering: detect, confirm and adjust

In this paper, we depart from TCP-Probing (Tsaoussidis and Badr, 2000) and propose an experimental transport protocol that achieves energy and throughput performance gains in mixed wired and wireless environments. Our approach decouples error recovery from contention estimation and focuses on the way these two mechanisms can (i) feed the probing decision process and (ii) implement the protocol strategy by shaping traffic, according to detected conditions. We use a validation mechanism that uncovers previous possibly wrong estimations. Our analysis matches well our simulation results that are very promising.