Experimental Analysis of TCP Performance in Static Multi-hop Ad Hoc Networks

Many previous papers have pointed out that TCP performance in multi-hop ad hoc networks (MANETs) is sub-optimal. This is due to several TCP design principles that reflect the characteristics of wired networks dominant at the time when TCP was designed that do not hold in MANETs. Based on this evidence, several TCP variants have been proposed in the literature. However, little effort has been devoted to investigate the performance of TCP in a real environment, even in a static scenario. Most of the work relies on simulation. In this chapter we provide an experimental analysis of TCP in static multi-hop ad hoc networks. We investigate the TCP performance in a simple, but interesting, scenario, i.e., a chain topology with different number of hops. We highlight some results contrasting with simulations and show that these discrepancies are due to the different protocols -or different protocol implementations -used in practice with respect to simulation tools.