Split TCP for mobile ad hoc networks

The fairness and throughput of TCP suffer when it is used in mobile ad hoc networks. This is because TCP wrongly attributes packet losses due to link failures (a consequence of mobility) to congestion. The resulting overall degradation of throughput especially affects connections with a large number of hops, where link failures are more likely; thus, short connections enjoy an unfair advantage. Furthermore, if the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used, the problems are exacerbated due to the protocol-induced capture effect, leading to greater unfairness and a further throughput degradation. We develop a scheme, called split TCP, which separates the TCP functions of congestion control and reliable packet delivery. For any TCP connection, certain nodes along the route take up the role of being proxies for that connection. The proxies buffer packets upon receipt and administer rate control. The buffering enables dropped packets to be recovered from the most recent proxy. The rate control helps in controlling congestion on inter-proxy segments. Thus, we emulate shorter TCP connections and can thereby achieve better parallelism in the network. Simulations show that the use of proxies improves the total throughput by as much as 30% in typical scenarios and reduces unfairness significantly. In terms of an unfairness metric that we introduce, the unfairness decreases from 0.8 to 0.2 (1.0 being the maximum unfairness). We conclude that incorporating TCP proxies is beneficial in terms of improving TCP performance in ad hoc networks.