Use of TCP Decoupling in Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Networks

We propose using the TCP decoupling approach to improve a TCP connection's goodput over wireless networks. The performance improvement can be analytically shown to be proportional to p MTU=HP Sz, where MTU is the maximum transmission unit of participating wireless links and HP Sz is the size of a packet containing only a TCP/IP header. For example, on a WaveLAN [33] wireless network, where MTU is 1500 bytes and HP Sz is 40 bytes, the achieved goodput improvement is about 350%. We present experimental results demonstrating that TCP decoupling outperforms TCP reno and TCP SACK. These results con rm the analysis of p MTU=HP Sz performance improvement.