A Novel Receiver-Aided Scheme for Improving TCP Performance in Multihop Wireless Networks

In general, TCP sender will take all the packet losses as congestion caused and reduce the packet sending rate to avoid the worsening of network condition. In multihop wireless networks, the long propagation time, poor link quality and high bit error rate make this scheme slow-moving, overcompensated and inefficient.This paper proposes a new optimized data delivery scheme, called TCP receiver-aided (TCP-RA) scheme. By continuously observing the packet's end-to-end delay condition, the receiver can estimate the congestion degree and sense the changes of situation. When packet losses happen, the receiver will estimate the reason of loss and assist the sender to control sending rate more efficiently in congestion control. Compared with several contemporary TCP schemes, experimental studies reveal that the TCP-RA scheme can accurately differentiate various packet losses and efficiently improve the throughput performance by control the sending rate smartly.