Performance Study of TULIP Protocol over 802.11 Wireless Networks

The TCP performance degrades over the wireless networks due to non congestion related problems but performs well in case of wired networks. The current network scenarios consist of combined wired and wireless links which demands for investigating the performance in such heterogeneous scenarios. The non congestion losses on the wireless link are interpreted by TCP as congestion losses and eventually congestion control algorithms are invoked. This leads to high end to end delay and decreased application throughput. This paper investigates the TCP performance improvement using TULIP protocol. In the proposed algorithm, the TULIP communicates with MAC protocol which provides efficient and reliable frame exchange over the shared wireless channels. TULIP also uses RTS-CTS strategy for decreasing collision over the wireless links. The protocol also uses fast recovery and retransmit algorithm to recover the lost packets for achieving higher TCP performance. The proposed algorithm has been implemented using NS2 simulator and result obtained thereof has been presented in the form of important TCP metric. Results showed that the proposed algorithm results in performance improvement over the existing Split connection and End to End technique. General Terms Wireless Networks, TULIP, Network security.