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Modeling TCP SACK performance over wireless channels with semi-reliable ARQ/FEC

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Abstract

Providing reliable data communications over wireless channels is a challenging task because time-varying wireless channel characteristics often lead to bit errors. These errors result in loss of IP packets and, consequently, TCP segments encapsulated into these packets. Since TCP cannot distinguish packet losses due to bit corruption from those due to network congestion, any packet loss caused by wireless channel impairments leads to unnecessary execution of the TCP congestion control algorithms and, hence, sub-optimal performance. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) try to improve communication reliability and reduce packet losses by detecting and recovering corrupted bits. Most analytical models that studied the effect of ARQ and FEC on TCP performance assumed that the ARQ scheme is perfectly persistent (i.e., completely reliable), thus a frame is always successfully transmitted irrespective of the number of transmission attempts it takes. In this paper, we develop an analytical cross-layer model for a TCP connection running over a wireless channel with a semi-reliable ARQ scheme, where the amount of transmission attempts is limited by some number. The model allows to evaluate the joint effect of stochastic properties of the wireless channel characteristics and various implementation-specific parameters on TCP performance, which makes it suitable for performance optimization studies. The input parameters include the bit error rate, the value of the normalized autocorrelation function of bit error observations at lag 1, the strength of the FEC code, the persistency of ARQ, the size of protocol data units at different layers, the raw data rate of the wireless channel, and the bottleneck link buffer size.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Dmitri Moltchanov & Roman Dunaytsev

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  1. Dmitri Moltchanov
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  2. Roman Dunaytsev
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Correspondence to Roman Dunaytsev.

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Moltchanov, D., Dunaytsev, R. Modeling TCP SACK performance over wireless channels with semi-reliable ARQ/FEC. Wireless Netw 16, 1837–1863 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-009-0231-9

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