An Adaptive TCP for Enhancing the Performance of TCP in Mobile Environments

Transmission control protocol (TCP) has been designed and tuned as a reliable transfer protocol for wired links. However, it incurs end-to-end performance degradation in mobile environments. Recent years, many protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of TCP in mobile environments. Although these methods simulate better than original TCP, but they either need intermediaries (such as base station) to modify TCP, can not handle the end-to-end encrypted traffic or do not perform well in both high bit error rates and disconnections. In this paper, we propose a protocol named adaptive TCP, which is a combination of TCP HACK (Header Checksum Option) and Freeze-TCP. By using the adaptive TCP, we can get a true end-to-end TCP and improve the performance of TCP over mobile environments in both high bit error rates and disconnections. We use OPNET to simulate our proposal, the results have shown that our proposal performs substantially better than original TCP in cases where there are bursty corruptions and long or frequent disconnections.