Path diversified retransmission for TCP over wireless mesh networks

Path diversity exploits multiple routes simultaneously, achieving higher aggregated bandwidth and potentially decreasing delay and packet loss. Unfortunately, for TCP, naive load splitting often results in inaccurate estimation of round trip time (RTT) and packet reordering. As a result, it can suffer from significant instability or even throughput reduction. This is particular severe in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), as validated by our analysis and simulation. To make multi-path TCP viable over WMNs, we propose a novel cross-layer design with a smart traffic split scheme, namely, Path Diversified Retransmission (PDR). PDR differentiates the original data packets and the retransmitted packets, and works with a novel QoS-aware multi-path routing protocol, QAOMDV, to distribute them separately. PDR does not suffer from the RTT underestimation and extra packet reordering, which ensures stable throughput improvement over single path routing. Through extensive simulations, we further demonstrate that, as compared to state-of-the-art multi-path protocols, our PDR with QAOMDV noticeably enhances the TCP throughput and reduces bandwidth fluctuation, with no obvious impact to fairness.