TCP BaLDE for Improving TCP Performance over Heterogeneous Networks

Tuan-Anh LE
Choong Seon HONG

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E89-B    No.4    pp.1127-1135
Publication Date: 2006/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e89-b.4.1127
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Internet Technology VI)
Category: 
Keyword: 
bandwidth estimate,  loss differentiation,  congestion control,  transport control protocol,  wireless network,  

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Summary: 
Network congestion and random errors of wireless link are two well-known noteworthy parameters which degrade the TCP performance over heterogeneous networks. We put forward a novel end-to-end TCP congestion control mechanism, namely TCP BaLDE (Bandwidth and Loss Differentiation Estimate), in which the TCP congestion control categorizes the reason of the packet loss by estimating loss differentiation in order to control the packet transmission rate appropriately. While controlling transmission rate depends on the available bandwidth estimation which is apprehended by the bandwidth estimation algorithm when the sender receives a new ACK with incipient congestion signal, duplicates ACKs or is triggered by retransmission timeout event. Especially, this helps the sender to avoid router queue overflow by opportunely entering the congestion avoidance phase. In simulation, we experimented under numerous different network conditions. The results show that TCP BaLDE can achieve robustness in aspect of stability, accuracy and rapidity of the estimate in comparison with TCP Westwood, and tolerate ACK compression. It can achieve better performance than TCP Reno and TCP Westwood. Moreover, it is fair on bottleneck sharing to multiple TCP flows of the same TCP version, and friendly to existing TCP version.