Effect of High Error Rate on the Behaviour of TCP Variants Using Realistic Error Model in Cellular Mobile Environment

TCP performance in the wireless environments is impacted by two path characteristics not normally present in wired environments: packet losses due to corruption and mobility. There are two mechanisms to model the wireless packet losses in simulation: Uniform error model and the Realistic error model (Two states). Uniform error model tends to produce inaccurate results, because in this error model packets are lost at a constant rate during the whole simulation. But in wireless environments, packet losses are random, bursty and time varying in nature. Realistic error model mimics this behavior of the wireless packet loss properly and produces accurate results. In this paper, we have used the realistic error model to model the wireless packet losses in order to create a realistic Cellular Mobile Environment so that we can get the real performance of TCP. In this research, we have investigated the behavior of TCP Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, Sack and Vegas in a Cellular Mobile network and tried to find out the impact of wireless link on the behavior of these TCP variants. Keywords— TCP, Realistic Error Model, Mobile, Wireless.