Improving TCP performance over wired-wireless networks

Today there is a growing demand for Internet services over WLAN hotspots. Majority of the Internet services today are based on TCP. However, TCP is not well-suited for heterogeneous networks consisting of wired and wireless networks. Losses in wireless network, which are quite frequent, are often misinterpreted by the TCP sender as loss due to congestion, which leads to poor performance of TCP. Hence, it is important to shield the TCP sender from wireless error. In this paper, we propose an improved method for identifying cases of wireless losses and tackling the loss at the local link level through MAC layer retransmissions. We then evaluate the effect of MAC layer retransmissions on the performance of TCP both analytically and empirically. Our empirical results show that significant improvement in TCP performance is possible through MAC layer retransmission.

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