Enhancing TCP performance for intersystem handoff within heterogeneous mobile networks

Various wireless access systems such as 2.5G/3G cellular systems and WLANs have quite different characteristics in terms of bandwidth, coverage, delay and cost. No single access system can provide every service satisfying all user's diverse needs with cost efficiency. Most of the heterogeneous mobile networks are combined and complementary constitute a hierarchical network. We consider the efficient and seamless TCP data transfer within the hierarchical network. We specify some problems that the current TCP experiences during an intersystem handoff and propose some simple modifications to enhance TCP performance and present the results.

[1]  Hiroshi Inamura,et al.  TCP over Second (2.5G) and Third (3G) Generation Wireless Networks , 2003, RFC.

[2]  Vipul Gupta,et al.  Freeze-TCP: a true end-to-end TCP enhancement mechanism for mobile environments , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[3]  V. Jacobson,et al.  Congestion avoidance and control , 1988, CCRV.

[4]  Ren Wang,et al.  TCP westwood: Bandwidth estimation for enhanced transport over wireless links , 2001, MobiCom '01.

[5]  B. R. Badrinath,et al.  I-TCP: indirect TCP for mobile hosts , 1995, Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[6]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Computing TCP's Retransmission Timer , 2000, RFC.

[7]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  The Eifel algorithm: making TCP robust against spurious retransmissions , 2000, CCRV.

[8]  Dorgham Sisalem,et al.  Seamless handover in terrestrial radio access networks: a case study , 2003, IEEE Commun. Mag..