Syndrome: a light-weight approach to improving TCP performance in mobile wireless networks

It is well known that the performance of TCP deteriorates in a mobile wireless environment. This is due to the fact that although the majority of packet losses are results of transmission errors over the wireless links, TCP senders still take packet loss as an indication of congestion, and adjust their congestion windows according to the additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm. As a result, the throughput attained by TCP connections in the wireless environment is much less than it should be. The key problem that leads to the performance degradation is that TCP senders are unable to distinguish whether packet loss is a result of congestion in the wireline network or transmission errors on the wireless links. In this paper, we propose a light-weight approach, called syndrome, to improving TCP performance in mobile wireless environments. In syndrome, the BS simply counts, for each TCP connection, the number of packets that it relays to the destination host so far, and attaches this number in the TCP header. Based on the combination of the TCP sequence number and the BS-attached number and a solid theoretical base, the destination host will be able to tell where (on the wireline or wireless networks) packet loss (if any) occurs, and notify TCP senders (via explicit loss notification, ELN) to take appropriate actions. If packet loss is a result of transmission errors on the wireless link, the sender does not have to reduce its congestion window. Syndrome is grounded on a rigorous, analytic foundation, does not require the base station to buffer packets or keep an enormous amount of states, and can be easily incorporated into the current protocol stack as a software patch. Through simulation studies in ns-2 (UCB, LBNL, VINT network simulator, http://www-mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/), we also show that syndrome significantly improves the TCP performance in wireless environments and the performance gain is comparable to the heavy-weight SNOOP approach (either with local retransmission or with ELN) that requires the base station to buffer, in the worst case, a window worth of packets or states. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.