TCP Flow Control in Lossy Networks: Analysis and Enhancement

TCP uses an implicit feedback based window ow control mechanism. The window size is increased on receipt of an acknowledgement and decreased on detection of a packet loss. Thus a packet loss is used as an indication of congestion in the network. In the course of experiments conducted over the Internet, we have observed that packet losses can occur due to reasons other than congestion. In this paper, we use analysis and simulation to show that the current ow control scheme results in a signiicant drop in the throughput even if the likelihood of non congestion related loss is quite low. Based on our analysis we suggest a modiication to the current scheme. Experimental results show that the modiied scheme improves throughput signiicantly.