Snoop TCP performance over GPRS

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) system developed to work with the existing GSM infrastructure is basically a packet switching system via radio that will provide an easy adaptation to bursty traffic generated by Internet applications like e-mail, WWW and FTP. These applications use as transport protocol TCP and therefore a good interaction is necessary between TCP and the GPRS protocols. TCP is a protocol initially designed to work in fixed networks, and in order to solve its problems in wireless networks, some proposals have been made in the last years. One of the most important proposals is the Snoop TCP protocol, which was initially designed to work in a wireless LAN environment. We analyze the performance of the Snoop TCP protocol in a GPRS network. We demonstrate that the Snoop agent does not work well in a busy GPRS network