Explicit Congestion Control for Efficient Reliable Transport in IP-based Tactical Networks

This paper focuses on the performance of reliable unicast transport protocols in the mobile ad hoc environment. It highlights inherent TCP limitations that can severely degrade its performance in such environments. It emphasizes the importance of an explicit congestion notification capability for differentiating between losses due to congestion and other causes, such as bit error. It briefly discusses properties of different TCP variants and selects ATCP as the most effective protocol in achieving congestion control. Using simulation results, it illustrates throughput improvements that ATCP can provide over standard TCP in the tactical environment. It further establishes superior ATCP performance by comparing transfer times measured for transferring a large file between two computers in a laboratory environment using standard Linux TCP implementation and our implementation of ATCP in the Linux environment