TCP-Probing: Towards an Error Control Schema with Energy and Throughput Performance Gains

Today’s universal communications increasingly involve mobile and battery-powered devices (e.g. hand-held, laptop) over wired and wireless networks. Energy efficiency, as well as throughput, are becoming service characteristics of dominant importance in communication protocols. Although standard TCP versions lack the functionality to efficiently adjust their error-control strategies to distinct characteristics of network environments and to specific constraints of communicating devices, the wide range of TCP-based applications have rendered TCP the de facto standard for reliable end-to-end communications. In this work we propose “grafting” two components of strategic significance onto standard TCP: a Probing mechanism and an Immediate Recovery strategy. Our results show that these enhancements yield higher throughput while maintaining lower levels of energy expenditure, and thus have the potential of promoting TCP’s congestion control to a universal error-control schema for heterogeneous wired/wireless channels. Furthermore, the enhancements do not damage the end-to-end characteristics of the TCP, nor do they require changes to its semantics: the mechanisms are implemented as option extensions to the TCP header. We compare “TCP-Probing” with Tahoe, Reno, and New Reno, and show that it can be a protocol of choice for heterogeneous wired/wireless communications with respect to energy and throughput performance.