Influence of False Congestion Alarms on Performance for Congestion Control based on Dynamic Window Flow Mechanism in Wireless Networks

The strong drive toward ubiquitous networks through end system mobility has made it necessary to include wireless networks, such as wireless local area networks (LANs) and satellite networks. Networks with wireless links suffer from significant packet-losses due to bit errors. The congestion detection mechanism of congestion control based on dynamic window flow control, which is widely used for reliable window protocols such as TCP, is well-known to be simple, but it may raise false alarms: a sender usually interprets loss as a sign of congestion and reduces the window size unnecessarily if packets were lost due to bit errors (e.g., [1]). This paper aims to 1) investigate the influence of false congestion alarms on the performance of dynamic window flow control (DWFC) in a network environment where the bit error rate is not negligible such as wireless networks and 2) provide a fundamental insight into this issue for TCP.