Tcp Performance for Future Ip-based Wireless Networks

In recent years, many extensive studies have been performed that have attempted to improve the performance of TCP for wireless networks. The common assumptions made by TCP for wired networks definitely do not hold for wireless networks. TCP with its semantics such as end-to-end flow control, a congestion control mechanism and error recovery provide reliability in wired networks. Wireless communication has significantly different characteristics compared to wired networks such as higher bit error rates, higher latency, limited bandwidth, multi-path fading of the signals and handoff. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to TCP that will be referred to as E-TCP, which improves upon conventional TCP congestion and flow control in a wireless environment. Our simulation results show significant improvements to TCP performance can be achieved.