Reducing collisions of a TCP stream on multi-hop wireless networks

On the multi-hop wireless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks and mesh networks, each packet is forwarded by intermediate nodes, and the packet is transmitted multiple times. In contrast to the wired networks, any transmissions by different nodes for a TCP stream may collide with each other, even if these nodes sense carrier correctly. In this poster, we propose a method to reduce the number of collisions of a TCP stream on multi-hop wireless networks. The method is designed for IEEE 802.11 MAC with help of TCP protocol stack, and it consists of two parts: packet pacing by a TCP stream source and eager forwarding by intermediate nodes. Referring the round trip time and the window size of the TCP stream, the MAC layer of the TCP stream source postpones a transmission of a TCP segment, until the previous TCP segment would be forwarded to several hops away.