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Use of TCP Decoupling in Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Networks

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Abstract

We propose using the TCP decoupling approach to improve a TCP connection's goodput over wireless networks. The performance improvement can be analytically shown to be proportional to \(\sqrt {{\text{MTU/HP\_Sz}}} \), where MTU is the maximum transmission unit of participating wireless links and HP_Sz is the size of a packet containing only a TCP/IP header. For example, on a WaveLAN [32] wireless network, where MTU is 1500 bytes and HP_Sz is 40 bytes, the achieved goodput improvement is about 350%. We present experimental results demonstrating that TCP decoupling outperforms TCP reno and TCP SACK. These results confirm the analysis of \(\sqrt {{\text{MTU/HP\_Sz}}} \) performance improvement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    S.Y. Wang

  2. Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    H.T. Kung

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  1. S.Y. Wang
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  2. H.T. Kung
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Wang, S., Kung, H. Use of TCP Decoupling in Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Networks. Wireless Networks 7, 221–236 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016669921107

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