Performance of TCP over Ad Hoc Networks: Analysis and Enhancement

The IEEE 802.11 standard suffers from a number of serious performance problems when used alongside with TCP, the most popular transport protocol, in a multi-hop wireless ad-hoc environment. This paper focuses on enhancement of the performance of TCP over ad hoc networks that uses the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Two approaches where adopted; the first focuses on the use of new technique in the MAC-layer so-called quick-exchange (QE). In the second approach, the TCP receiver uses the delayed acknowledgement option. This paper has, focused on modeling the TCP over multi-hop IEEE 802.11 network with channel effects. The objective is to provide a better understanding of the effects of various parameters on TCP performance. We have present an analytical modeling for the system under consideration along with numerical and simulation validations via a number of simplified examples under some simplifying assumptions. This has resulted in a closed form formulas for TCP throughput under various channel states. Validation results have confirmed the performance enhancement we have expected.