Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Improving performance of TCP over mobile wireless networks

  • Published:
Wireless Networks Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Mobile IP is a network layer protocol for handling mobility of hosts in the Internet. However, mobile IP handoff causes degradation of TCP performance. Hence, there is a need for improving performance of TCP over mobile IP in wireless mobile networks. We propose an approach which handles losses due to both wireless link errors and host mobility. To handle losses due to host mobility, a method for seamless handoff is proposed. Empirical results show that the scheme provides substantial improvement of performance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. In this paper, we have used MIPv4 (IPv4 version of MIP) for experiments. Nevertheless, most of the concepts described in this paper are applicable to MIPv6 too.

  2. For some wireless networks such as GPRS, the base stations do not have the IP-layer protocol. For such networks, the proposed TCP agent is to be deployed at the network element which houses FA (a possible network element is GGSN). Hence in such cases, the BS should be read as appropriate network element.

  3. The problem of sequence wrapping arising in high-speed TCP does not arise here. However, if it arises it can be tackled as in high-speed TCP.

  4. Throughout this section, it should be read as the intermediate agent hosting MWTCP in case the MWTCP agent is hosted on a node other than BS.

  5. W-TCP was implemented on ns-v.1.2a3 only and did not include MIP.

  6. The throughput is measured as the average number of bits successfully transmitted to the mobile host in a second.

  7. Ns-2 does not implement error at the bit level. Rather, it uses packet (not to be confused with TCP segment or datagram) as a unit of data. Packet error probability is the error that a packet in ns-2 contains one or more erroneous bits. PER is used to simulate corruption of data. If a packet in ns-2 is corrupted, it is dropped. Hence, a non-zero PER does not mean that TCP packets are received with erroneous bits. Packets that are acknowledged by TCP are error-free.

  8. Jitter has been measured as moving average of delay variations between two consecutive packets received at the MH. Hence, jitter has been measured at the MH for downlink traffic.

References

  1. Patel, A., & Giaretta, G (2006). Problem statement for bootstrapping mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), RFC 4640http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4640.txt

  2. Perkins, C. (2002). IP mobility support for IPv4, RFC 3344, IETF, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3344.txt

  3. Perkins, C., Calhoun, P., & Bharatia, J. (2007). Mobile IPv4 challenge/response extensions (Revised), RFC 4721, IETF, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4721.txt

  4. Johnson, D., Perkins, C., & Arkko, C. (2004). Mobility support in IPv6, RFC rfc3775, IETF, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3775.txt

  5. Bakre, A., & Badrinath, B. I-TCP: Indirect TCP for mobile hosts. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on distributed computing systems, May.

  6. Balakrishnan, H., Seshan, S., & Katz, R. H. (1995). Improving reliable transport and handoff performance in cellular wireless networks. ACM Wireless Networks, 1(4), 469–482.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Caceres, R., & Iftode, L. (1995). Improving the performance of reliable transport protocols in mobile computing environments. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 13(5), 850–857.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Caceres, R., & Padmanabhan, V. N. (1996). Fast and scalable handoffs in wireless internetworks. In Proceedings of MobiCom.

  9. Koodli, R. (Ed.). Fast handovers for mobile IPv6. RFC 4068, IETF, July 2005. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4068.txt

  10. Ramjee, R. et al. (1999). HAWAII: A domain-based approach for supporting mobility in wide-area wireless networks. Proceedings of IEEE Int’l Conference. Network Protocols, 1999.

  11. Valko, A. et al. (2000). Design and performance of cellular access networks. IEEE personal communications, Special issue on IP-based mobile telecommunications networks.

  12. Hsieh, R., & Seneviratne, A. (2003). A comparison of mechanisms for improving mobile IP handoff latency for end-to-end TCP, MobiCom’03, September 14–19, 2003 (pp. 29–41).

  13. Malki, K. (Ed.) (2002). Low latency handoffs in mobile IPv4. Internet draft, IETF.

  14. McCann, P. (2005). Mobile IPv6 fast handovers for 802.11 Networks, RFC 4260. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4260.txt

  15. Hsieh, R., & Seneviratne, A. (2002). Performance analysis on hierarchical mobile IPv6 with fast-handoff over end-to-end TCP. In Proceedings of GLOBECOM, Taipei, Taiwan 2002.

  16. Soliman, H., Castelluccia, C., Malki, K., & Bellier, L. (2005). Hierarchical MIPv6 mobility management (HMIPv6), RFC 4140, IETF, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4140.txt

  17. Malki, K., & Soliman, H. (2002). Simultaneous bindings for mobile IPv6 fast handoffs. Internet draft, IETF.

  18. Hsieh, R., Zhou, Z.-G., & Seneviratne, A. (2003). S-MIP: A seamless handoff architecture for mobile IP. In Proceedings of INFOCOM, San Francisco, USA, 2003.

  19. Gogo, K., Shibui, R., Teraoka, F. (2006). An L3-driven fast handover mechanism in IPv6 mobility, In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications and the Internet Workshops (SAINTW’06), 2006.

  20. Yavatkar, R., & Bhagwat, N. Improving end-to-end performance of TCP over mobile internetworks. Proceedings of the workshop on mobile computing systems and applications (pp. 146–152). Santa Cruz, CA.

  21. Brown, K., & Singh, S. (1997). M-TCP: TCP for mobile cellular networks. Computer Communications review, July, 19–43.

  22. Ratnam, K., & Matta, I. (2003). W-TCP: An efficient mechanism for improving wireless access to TCP services. International Journal of Communication System, 16, 47–62.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  23. Goff, T., Mronski, J., Phatak, D. S., & Gupta, V. (2000). Freeze-TCP: A true end-to-end TCP enhancement mechanism for mobile environments. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM’ 2000, 1537–1545.

  24. Bakshi, B. S., Krishna, P., Vaidya, N. H., & Pradhan, D. K. (1996). Improving performance of TCP over wireless networks. Technical Report 96-014, Texas A & M University.

  25. Chandran, K., Raghunathan, S., Venkatesan, S., & Prakash, R. (2001). A feedback-based scheme for improving TCP performance in ad hoc wireless networks. IEEE Personal Communications, Feb., 34–39.

  26. Nanda, S., Ejzak, R., & Doshi, B. (1994). A retransmission scheme for circuit-mode data on wireless links. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 12(8), 1338–1352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Ayanoglu, E., Paul, S., Laporta, T. F., Sabnani, K., & Gitlin, R. (1995). AIRMAIL: A link-layer protocol for wireless networks. Wireless Networks, 1, 47–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. “DoCoMo’s iMode: Toward mobile multimedia in 3G”, presentation given at March 2000 IETF meeting, IETF 47, plenary session http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/00mar/slides/plenary-imode-00mar/sld002.htm

  29. WAP Forum, Wireless profiled TCP, http://www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm, version 31-March-2001.

  30. Rutagemwa, H., Shi, M., Shen, X., & Mark, J. W. (forthcoming). Wireless profiled TCP performance over integrated wireless LANs and cellular networks. IEEE Transactions On Wireless Communications.

  31. Mondal, S. A., & Luqman, F. B. (2007). Improving TCP performance over wired-wireless networks. Computer Networks, 51(13), 3799–3811.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  32. The UCB/LBNL/VINT Network Simulator—ns (version 2). http://www.isi.edu/nsnam

  33. Widmer, J. Extensions to the ns network simulator. http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/∼widmer

Download references

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Karunaharan Ratnam and Ibrahim Matta for W-TCP code and Robert Heish and Aruna Seneviratne for making the Fast-handover implementation available. The author is thankful to anonymous reviewers and the editor in particular, whose suggestions helped a lot in improving the article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. India Science Lab, General Motors R&D, 2nd Floor, Creator Building, ITPB, Whitefield Road, Bangalore, 560066, India

    Sakib A. Mondal

Authors
  1. Sakib A. Mondal
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sakib A. Mondal.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Mondal, S.A. Improving performance of TCP over mobile wireless networks. Wireless Netw 15, 331–340 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-007-0052-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-007-0052-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation