An improved eifel algorithm for TCP over wireless links

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most widely used transport protocol today for Internet access. However, TCP was designed for wired networks, so some of its original design assumptions do not hold for the current wireless networks any more. Problems have arisen in recent years for TCP over wireless links, such as spurious timeouts, congestion losses, etc. In the thesis, we propose a new approach, Eifel-I, for enhancing TCP's robustness in the presence of these problems. In conjunction with Eifel-I, we also suggest some enhancements to the TCP retransmission timer and to non-SACK TCPsa?? ability in handling multiple packet losses. Experiment results show that in situations like wireless networks where packet losses and variable delays frequently occur or co-occur, Eifel-I can deliver consistent performance improvement. In all the scenarios we have experimented, Eifel-I is always better than or at least the same as the other related approaches. In certain cases, it can achieve up to 40% improvement over the original TCP, and more than 20% improvement over approaches like DSACK, Eifel and F-RTO.