On Providing Support for Protocol Adaptation in Mobile Wireless Networks

The availability of variety of communication devices offers a choice among networks with vastly different characteristics. No single protocol or application can be expected to perform well over all these networks. A mobile host is likely to encounter these different networks and needs to adapt accordingly. The problem of adapting to a changing network environment is further complicated, because changes in network conditions are usually transparent to higher layers of the protocol stack. In order to allow automatic adaptation of applications and protocols, awareness of link conditions and network environment is necessary. In this paper, we present a uniform mechanism based on ICMP messages for providing information about the environment to the protocol stack. We also show how protocols can adapt to changes in the environment, and in particular, demonstrate dynamic fine tuning of some of the well known protocols such as UDP and TCP. Performance measurements demonstrate that our framework imposes little overheads and improves protocol performance under changing network conditions.