TCP HACK: TCP header checksum option to improve performance over lossy links

Author

Balan, R.K. ; Lee, B.P. ; Kumar, K.R.R. ; Jacob, L. ; Seah, W.K.G. ; Ananda, A.L.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput., Nat. Univ. of Singapore, Singapore

Volume

1

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

309

Abstract

Wireless networks have become increasingly common and an increasing number of devices are communicating with each other over lossy links. Unfortunately, TCP performs poorly over lossy links as it is unable to differentiate the loss due to packet corruption from that due to congestion. We present an extension to TCP which enables TCP to distinguish packet corruption from congestion in lossy environments resulting in improved performance. We refer to this extension as the HeAder ChecKsum option (HACK). We implemented our algorithm in the Linux kernel and performed various tests to determine its effectiveness. Our results have shown that HACK performs substantially better than both SACK and NewReno in cases where burst corruptions are frequent. We also found that HACK can co-exist very nicely with SACK and performs even better with SACK enabled

Keywords

Unix; packet radio networks; radio links; radio networks; telecommunication congestion control; transport protocols; Linux kernel; NewReno; SACK; TCP HACK; TCP header checksum option; algorithm; burst corruption; client-server network; congestion; lossy links performance; mobile computing; packet corruption; wireless networks; Bit error rate; Computer hacking; Computer networks; IP networks; Jacobian matrices; Linux; Performance loss; TCPIP; Wireless application protocol; Wireless networks;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

INFOCOM 2001. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings. IEEE

Conference_Location

Anchorage, AK

ISSN

0743-166X

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7016-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/INFCOM.2001.916713

Filename

916713