Analysis Of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) And Its Performance Enhancement Methods On Wireless Networks

ABSTRACT

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant transport protocol in the Internet and supports many of the most popular Internet applications, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), file transfer and e-mail. The recently developed advanced wireless networks, such as GPRS, are known to cause delay spikes in packet transfer which causes unnecessary TCP retransmission timeouts. In order to find solutions to this effect, packet losses across wireless links should be distinguished from congestion related packet losses. This thesis concentrates on the analysis of two main strategies for enabling the TCP congestion control mechanism which determines the causes for packet losses. Finally, an analytical TCP throughput model with enhanced TCP Reno fast retransmit algorithm to avoid timeouts is developed. The results of its performance on WLAN show that the proposed model reduces the TCP timeouts and improves the TCP performance compared to that of TCP Reno.