Improving TCP over wireless by selectively protecting packet transmissions

One of the major challenges in modern communication systems is to provide wireless access to the Internet. Since TCP is expected to be used for Internet connectivity at the transport layer, we need to improve TCP performance over wireless links. Our key idea is to identify the TCP data segments which are of ´critical´ importance to the protocol evolution, and, by using FEC coding, increase the probability of successfully transmitting them over the radio channel. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated in terms of file transfer completion time.