Transport-Layer Performance in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

Wireless communication has seen a tremendous growth in the last decades. Continuing on this trend, wireless multi-hop networks are nowadays used or planned for use in a multitude of contexts, spanning from Internet access at home to emergency situations. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides reliable and ordered delivery of a data and is used by major Internet applications such as web browsers, email clients and file transfer programs. TCP traffic is also the dominating traffic type on the Internet. However, TCP performs less than optimal in wireless multi-hop networks due to packet reordering, low link capacity, packet loss and variable delay. In this thesis, we develop novel proposals for enhancing the network and transport layer to improve TCP performance in wireless multi-hop networks. As initial studies, we experimentally evaluate the performance of different TCP variants, with and without mobile nodes. We further evaluate the impact of multi-path routing on TCP performance and propose packet aggregation combined with aggregation aware multi-path forwarding as a means to better utilize the available bandwidth. The last contribution is a novel extension to multi-path TCP to enable single-homed hosts to fully utilize the network capacity.