Improving TCP performance with bandwidth estimation and selective negative acknowledgment in wireless networks

This paper investigates the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) transport protocol over IEEE 802.11 infrastructure based wireless networks. A wireless link is generally characterized by high transmission errors, random interference and a varying latency. The erratic packet losses usually lead to a curbing of the flow of segments on the TCP connection and thus limit TCP´s performance. This paper examines the impact of the lossy nature of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks on the TCP performance and proposes a scheme to improve the performance of TCP over wireless links. A negative acknowledgment scheme, selective negative acknowledgment (SNACK), is applied on TCP over wireless networks and a series of ns-2 simulations are performed to compare its performance against that of other TCP schemes. The simulation results confirm that SNACK and its proposed enhancement SNACK-S, which incorporates a bandwidth estimation model at the sender, outperform conventional TCP implementations in 802.11 wireless networks.