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Abstract:

As wireless links work their way into the Internet fabric, it becomes increasingly important to understand how to support the additional requirements presented by wireless connections and how to accommodate the different characteristics of these connections. As a protocol designed for wired connections, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) operates under some basic assumptions that may not be true for wireless connections, for example that packet losses are due to congestion in the network. Because TCP is the foundation of so many applications on the Internet, it will be necessary to examine its operation in the presence of wireless links very carefully. This paper reports on a preliminary investigation of TCP performance across wireless links. Our results are derived from measurements taken on an experimental testbed, and our work differs from earlier work in its consideration of matters internal to TCP, such as the behaviour of the retransmission timeout and windowing mechanisms in the presence of a wireless link. This helps us to understand in detail the impact of a wireless link on end-to-end TCP performance. 1

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