Efficient TCP with Pacing for Multi-Hop Ad Hoc Networks

In multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks, it is well known that TCP suffers severe performance degradation. This is due to its window-based approach to transmission control, which injects traffic bursts into the network. These bursts increase the frequency of contention in the MAC layer which forces the dropping of some packets. This paper proposes an efficient TCP with pacing, Paced TCP, to alleviate MAC contention and thus achieve better performance than the traditional TCP variants. Our design approach is a TCP that probe the available bandwidth of the network without affecting the stability of the network. Simulations show that Paced TCP not only achieves better performance but is also friendly to UDP traffic.