The Effect of Hybrid ARQ Schemes on the TCP Connection over Wireless Link

Current research on wireless TCP always assumes that link layer utilizes the hybrid ARQ scheme without packet combining for error recovery. However, there are two other hybrid ARQ schemes with packet combining used to recover error at link layer. Little attention is paid to how the two schemes affect the wireless TCP. In this paper, we study the effect of the three hybrid ARQ schemes on the spurious TCP timeouts over wireless link via extensive simulation and numerical analysis. We find that the hybrid ARQ schemes with packet combining can avoid spurious TCP time more efficiently than the ARQ scheme without packet combining when the persistency of ARQ schemes is full. This suggests that the hybrid ARQ schemes with packet combining and fully persistency policy is enough to improve TCP performance over wireless link.