Effect of correlated errors on TCP

Center for Wireless Communications, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr. La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, USA – fax: +1-619-534-2486 – e-mail: fzorzi,[email protected] Abstract— In this paper, we study the throughput and energy efficiency of TCP in the presence of correlated packet errors described by a Markov channel model. We consider a single connection and study the evolution of the window size. A Markov approach is developed and tight bounds are derived. It is shown that TCP performs better in the presence of clustered errors, suggesting that techniques that reduce channel memory may be undesirable. We also identify the tradeoff between instantaneous throughput and energy efficiency.