A TCP Congestion Control Approach over Wireless Networks

Reliable transport protocols such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are tuned to perform well in traditional wired networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However, networks with wireless and lossy links also suffer from significant packet losses due to bit errors and hand-offs. TCPW has been proved to work better in performance and bandwidth utilization than Reno and New Reno in wireless networks. Our research mainly focuses on the slow-start phase and congestion control of TCPW and develops an algorithm to divide the phase into two parts. In the first half of slow-start, we use the exponential increase just like the original slow-start. We manage the congestion window by RTT estimation in the second half of slow-start. Simulate results shows a obvious improvement compared to TCPW.