Enhancing TCP energy efficiency for mobile hosts

We present the finding of an investigation into an energy and performance enhancing technique for TCP operating in wireless networking environments. This technique, in contrast to other schemes that have been studied to date, is based on the concept of minimizing the probability of packet loss in wireless links rather than on error recovery. The scheme we propose intelligently suspends transmissions when the wireless link displays poor error characteristics and resumes when the error condition abates, to minimize packet loss without TCP modification. Through simulation, in a LAN environment it is shown that intelligently suspension and resumption is possible to get better TCP performance and energy efficiency when the error is persistent, with long duration of a bad period and a high error rate. On the other hand, in a WAN environment it is worth doing in all situations as it can improve the energy efficiency up to 40% and and the TCP performance up to 35%. This study leads to improve TCP performance and energy efficiency by deploying lower layer information efficiently.