Modeling TCP Throughput over Wired/Wireless Heterogeneous Networks for Receiver-Based ACK Splitting Mechanism

Recently, heterogeneous networks with wired and wireless links are becoming common. However, the performance of TCP data transmission deteriorates significantly over such networks because of packet losses caused by the high bit error rate of wireless links. We had proposed receiver-based ACK splitting mechanism to solve that problem previously. Our mechanism does not need modifications to the sender TCP or the base station. It uses the ACK-splitting method for increasing the congestion window size quickly to restrain the throughput degradation caused by packet losses due to the high bit error rate of wireless links. In this paper, to evaluate the effectiveness of our mechanism, we develop a mathematical method to derive the throughput of a TCP connection over heterogeneous networks. In result, we find that the larger the bandwidth of the wireless link is, the more effective our mechanism becomes, therefore, the mechanism’s usability will increase in the future.