Improvement of TCP throughput with the snoop+α protocol

The Snoop protocol is one of the ways to alleviate the effects of noncongestion-related losses on TCP performance over wireless networks. It can improve TCP performance quite well in wireless links but has a problem; when there are no duplicate ACKs, the Snoop protocol cannot notice the packet loss until the local retransmission timer is expired. This results in the degradation of TCP throughput. In this paper, we propose the Snoop+alpha protocol to solve the Snoop protocol´s problem. Because the Snoop+alpha agent adaptively checks packet loss whenever it receives new ACKs, it performs packet retransmission fast compared to the Snoop protocol. From the simulation results, the proposed Snoop+alpha protocol can efficiently improve TCP throughput more than the Snoop protocol. Furthermore, the degree of TCP throughput enhancement is little influenced from the fading variation