Performance Evaluation of TCP and UDP over Wireless Ad-hoc Networks with Varying Traffic Loads

Wireless ad-hoc networks have attracted immense research interest in the past few years. Most of the research has concentrated on the performance of routing protocols in ad-hoc networks. Apart from routing, it is also important to study the protocols used at transport layer such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Data gram Protocol (UDP) and their effect on data propagation in ad-hoc networks. TCP was mainly designed for wired networks. Characteristics of wireless networks such as frequent link changes, hidden and exposed node problems, interference between signals of neighboring nodes, contention with TCP-ACK packets and routing protocols can affect the performance of TCP protocol in wireless networks. Due to lack of congestion control schemes, applications running over UDP can overwhelm the network with packets leading to higher energy and bandwidth usage. In this paper, we have studied the effect of TCP and UDP on the performance of wireless ad-hoc networks. The nodes in our network scenarios are static and placed in grid topology. We have analyzed how TCP and UDP protocols perform with increased traffic load and congestion in the network. From the obtained results it is observed that TCP performs better in terms of PDR and Latency, while UDP provides better Throughput when compared to TCP.