An Extension to TCP HACK for Improving the Performance of TCP in Lossy Environments

TCP has been designed and tuned as a reliable transfer protocol for wired links. However, it incurs end-to-end performance degradation in wireless environments where packet loss is very high. TCP HACK(Header Checksum Option) is a novel mechanism proposed to improve original TCP in lossy link. It presents an extension to TCP that enables TCP to distinguish packet corruption from congestion in losssy environments. TCP HACK performs well when the sender receives the special ACKs correctly, but if the ACKs are also lost much, the efficient of TCP HACK will not be prominent. In this paper we present an extension to TCP HACK, which can perform well even when the ACKs are much corrupted.