Enhancing TCP Performance Through Intelligent Activation/Deactivation

Improvements of TCP performance in wireless networks have been tossed around for several years. One mechanism that has received considerable attention is the use of error recovery techniques thereby compensating for the wireless loss characteristics. However, surprisingly, to our knowledge no study in error avoidance has been carried out. This paper proposed the use of an error avoidance scheme for improving the performance of TCP in wireless environments by simply avoiding transmitting data under poor radio coverage conditions. The decision to transmit or not is taken by comparing the signal to noise ratio (SNR). In effect, the transmissions are suspended when the SNR is decreasing and goes below a given threshold, and resume transmission when the SNR goes back above the SNR threshold. This can be realized without modifying TCP by using a thin layer between the network and transport layers. The result showed that the TCP sender could obtain significantly better performance, improvements up to 15 % on TCP throughput by using this technique.