Co-Existence of Network and Terminal Mobility in the Context of TCP Performance

Both the network mobility and the terminal mobility are likely to co-exist in the future. These two mobile communication paradigms have different wireless connectivity models and likely to deploy different schemes to address the wireless related performance issues for TCP. In this paper, we consider TCP Snoop, which allows a mobile terminal to efficiently recover from wireless-related losses. For the network mobility, we consider on-board TCP (obTCP), which improves snooping performance when the mobile terminal is located inside a moving network. We investigate the performance of obTCP and Snoop when they operate over a common cellular base station. We evaluate their end-to-end throughput, and also their fairness in using cellular resources. Our study reveals that obTCP achieves higher throughput than Snoop. We have further analyzed the results to show that the differences in the retransmission mechanisms of Snoop and obTCP are responsible for the higher throughput attained by obTCP. We have also observed that, obTCP does not bring any significant unfair to Snoop, allowing network mobility to co-exist with terminal mobility.