Improving Mobile-TCP Performance over Wireless Networks

TCP is designed to perform in traditional wired networks where packet losses occur mainly due to network congestion. Wireless link losses result in poor TCP throughput since losses are perceived as congestion and TCP responds to all such losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms. Wireless link loss also incurs source throttling and hence degraded end-to-end performance. Wireless link designers have augmented mobile TCP a modified version of TCP to suit wireless conditions. But this mechanism has reduced the impact of losses on TCP throughput for smaller file transfer. In this paper, we propose an enhanced mobile TCP scheme for performance improvement for both smaller and larger file transfer over wireless link. OPNET based simulation results shows that proposed scheme improves TCP throughput by 60% over existing solutions.