A TCP performance enhancement scheme in infrastructure based vehicular networks

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in infrastructure based vehicular networks is dedicated to support reliable Internet services for mobile users. However, an end-to-end TCP flow not only experiences some common challenges in wireless mobile networks, such as high packet loss rate, medium access competition, unstable wireless bandwidth, and dynamic topology, etc., but also suffers from performance degradation due to traffic congestion at the Road-Side Units (RSUs) that connect the wireline and wireless networks. In order to address the challenging issues related to reliable TCP transmissions in infrastructure based vehicular networks, we propose an RSU based TCP (R-TCP) scheme. For wireline source nodes, R-TCP adopts a novel flow control mechanism to adjust transmission rates according to the status of bottleneck link. Specifically, during the short wireless connection time in Infrastructure based vehicular networks, R-TCP quickly chooses an ideal transmission rate for data transmissions instead of activating the slow start algorithm after the connection is established, and successfully avoids the oscillation of the transmission rate. Simulation results show that R-TCP achieves great advantages than some relate proposals in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet loss rate.