Empirical evaluation of receiver-based TCP delay control in CDMA2000 networks

Wide-area broadband wireless technologies such as CDMA2000 often suffer from variable transfer rate and long latency. In particular, TCP window-based rate control causes excessive buffering at the base station because of the lower transfer rate of the wireless link than that of the wired backhaul link. This performance characteristic of TCP further increases the end-to-end delay, and additional resources are required at the base station. This paper presents a practical mechanism to control the end-to-end TCP delay for CDMA2000 networks (or other similar wireless technologies). The key idea is to reduce and stabilize RTT (round-trip time) by dynamically controlling the TCP advertised window size, based on a runtime measurement of the wireless channel condition at the mobile station. The proposed system has been implemented by modifying the Linux protocol stack. The experiment results, conducted on a commercial CDMA2000 1x network, show that the proposed scheme greatly reduces the TCP delay in non-congested networks, while not sacrificing the TCP throughput in congested networks. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.