This paper presents the expected transmission count metric (ETX), which finds high-throughput paths on multi-hop wireless networks. ETX minimizes the expected total number of packet transmissions (including retransmissions) required to successfully deliver a packet to the ultimate destination. The ETX metric incorporates the effects of link loss ratios, asymmetry in the loss ratios between the two directions of each link, and interference among the successive links of a path. In contrast, the minimum hop-count metric chooses arbitrarily among the different paths of the same minimum length, regardless of the often large differences in throughput among those paths, and ignoring the possibility that a longer path might offer higher throughput. This

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Mobile ad hoc networks have gained a lot of attention lately as a means of providing continuous network connectivity to mobile computing devices regardless of physical location. Recently, a large amount of research has focused on the routing protocols needed in such an environment. In this two-part report, we investigate the effects that link breakage due to mobility has on TCP performance. Through simulation, we show that TCP throughput drops significantly when nodes move because of TCP's inability to recognize the difference between link failure and congestion. We also analyze specific examples, such as a situation where throughput is zero for a particular connection. We introduce a new metric, expected throughput, for the comparison of throughput in multi-hop networks, and then use this metric to show how the use of explicit link failure notification (ELFN) techniques can significantly improve TCP performance. In this paper (Part I of the report), we present the problem and an analysis of our simulation results. In Part II of this report, we present the simulation and results in detail.

TCP Westwood (TCPW) is a sender-side modification of the TCP congestion window algorithm that improves upon the performance of TCP Reno in wired as well as wireless networks. The improvement is most significant in wireless networks with lossy links, since TCP Westwood relies on endto-end bandwidth estimation to discriminate the cause of packet loss (congestion or wireless channel effect) which is a major problem in TCP Reno. An important distinguishing feature of TCP Westwood with respect to previous wireless TCP “extensions ” is that it does not require inspection and/or interception of TCP packets at intermediate (proxy) nodes. Rather, it fully complies with the end-to-end TCP design principle. The key innovative idea is to continuously measure at the TCP source the rate of the connection by monitoring the

This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that COPE largely increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.

Transport connections set up over wireless links are frequently plagued by problems such as { high bit error rate (BER), frequent disconnections of the mobile user, and low wireless bandwidth that may change dynamically. In this paper, we study the e ects of frequent disconnections and low variable bandwidth on TCP throughput and propose a protocol that addresses this problem. We discuss the implementation (in NetBSD) of our protocol called M-TCP and compare its performance against other mobile TCP implementations. We show that M-TCP has two signi cant advantages over other solutions: (1) it maintains end-to-end TCP semantics and, (2) it delivers excellent performance for environments where the mobile encounters periods of disconnection. 1

REM is an active queue management scheme that measures congestion not by a performance measure such as loss or delay, but by a quantity we call price. Price is computed by each link distributively using local information and is fed back to the sources through packet dropping or marking. This decoupling of congestion and performance measures allows REM to achieve high utilization with negligible delays and buffer overflow regardless of the number of. sources. We prove that REM is asymptotically stable and compare its performance with RED using simulations.

This paper presents and analyzes user behavior and network performance in a public-area wireless network using a workload captured at a well-attended ACM conference. The goals of our study are: (1) to extend our understanding of wireless user behavior and wireless network performance; (2) to characterize wireless users in terms of a parameterized model for use with analytic and simulation studies involving wireless LAN traffic; and (3) to apply our workload analysis results to issues in wireless network deployment, such as capacity planning, and potential network optimizations, such as algorithms for load balancing across multiple access points (APs) in a wireless network. 1.

Measuring the bottleneck link bandwidth along a path is important for understanding the performance of many Internet applications. Existing tools to measure bottleneck bandwidth are relatively slow, can only measure bandwidth in one direction, and/or actively send probe packets. We present the nettimer bottleneck link bandwidth measurement tool, the libdpcap distributed packet capture library, and experiments quantifying their utility. We test nettimer across a variety of bottleneck network technologies ranging from 19.2Kb/s to 100Mb/s, wired and wireless, symmetric and asymmetric bandwidth, across local area and crosscountry paths, while using both one and two packet capture hosts. In most cases, nettimer has an error of less than 10%, but at worst has an error of 40%, even on cross-country paths of 17 or more hops. It converges within 10KB of the first large packet arrival while consuming less than 7% of the network traffic being measured.

The scenario is that a bulk data transfer is being performed over a TCP connection, from a host on a local area network (LAN) to a mobile host attached to the LAN by a radio link. In earlier work [10] we had assumed that packet losses in a TCP connection over a radio link are statistically independent. In this paper, we extend this analysis to a Rayleigh fading link, which we model by a two state Markov model. The bulk throughputs of TCP-OldTahoe and TCP-Tahoe are compared with and without fading, for various average signal-to-noise ratios. We also study the performance with a link protocol on the wireless link, and study the effect of varying the link packet size, the number of link packet attempts, and the vehicle speed. For the parameters of the BSD UNIX implementation, over a 1.5Mbps wireless link, we find that, with fading, a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 30dB is required to get reasonable throughput with TCP Tahoe or OldTahoe; this corresponds to at least 100 ti...