Explicit Loss Notification to Improve TCP Performance over Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel TCP congestion control algorithm to overcome the weakness of the original TCP mechanism in wireless environments. The primary aim of the new algorithm is to cope with packet losses due to bit errors in the radio interface. Our solution is based on the idea of Explicit Loss Notification (ELN) to notify the sender about packet losses in the wireless channel. We also performed extensive simulations with different kind of traffic and error models to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed algorithm compared to the original TCP.