A Transport Protocol for Future Wireless Internets

Abstract

The traditional assumptions made by TCP
about the operation of wired networks are often found to be invalid for wireless networks. Standard TCP semantics such as end-to-end flow control, congestion control mechanisms and error recovery provide reliability in wired networks. However, wireless communication systems have different characteristics when compared to wired networks that include higher bit error rates, higher latency, limited bandwidth, multipath fading of the signals and handoff. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to TCP that we shall call ETCP, which improves upon conventional TCP when it is applied to the wireless environment. Our simulation results show significant improvements to TCP performance with respect to packet loss detection.