TCP Performance Improvement Scheme Using 802.11 MAC MIB in the Wireless Environment

Congestion control of the TCP reduces transmission rate when it detects packet loss because packet loss origines from congestion in the wired network. In the wireless network, packet loss comes from channel errors. Wired TCP degrades performance when there are wireless losses because it does not classify type of loss. These day, there are many researches which classify type of loss between congestion loss and wireless loss for wired-wireless hybrid network. For wireless TCP, many of existing algorithms are based on the estimated bandwidth or variations of packet arrival time. In this paper, we propose a new TCP scheme to distinguish the wireless packet losses from the congestion packet losses using MIB of the IEEE 802.11 MAC. We perform excessive simulations using the NS-2 network simulator and analyze the simulation results to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm to other well-known algorithms. From simulation results, we know that proposed algorithm improves performance about 12% and 32% compared with Spike algorithm and mBiaz algorithm, respectively.