Adapting wireless links to support standard network protocols

Wireless environments present significant challenges to the operation of many of today´s networking protocols. This paper explores how the wireless problem domain can be represented as a design space of a few independent variables, namely: reliability, latency, and bandwidth. These variables can be chosen in such a way as to match the wireless environment to the needs of the data being communicated. We select a single type of data, TCP bulk data transfer, and illustrate how the operating point in the design space is chosen. A simulation is presented which demonstrates that by matching the operating point in the wireless problem domain design space to the expectations of the data, much better performance is realized