Transport Control Protocols for Wireless Connections

In this paper, we study the effect of bit error rates and handoff disconnections on the performance of different TCP implementations (Tahoe, Reno, NewReno, and SACK). Test scenarios with larger link-up periods, when the mobile is connected, but higher disconnection probability yielded better performance than scenarios with smaller link-up periods and smaller disconnection probability. Our performance tests show that the performance of TCP is more sensitive to the length of the link-up period than the error rate of the wireless link, or the mobile disconnection probability. While SACK TCP is well known to perform better than Reno TCP in wired networks, the tests show that this is not the case in mobile networks. The paper presents performance results for the four TCP implementations in a mobile wireless environment and provides comparisons based on important performance metrics (throughput, goodput, transfer time) and multimedia QoS measures (average packet delay).