Window adaptive TCP for EGPRS networks

TCP congestion control has been widely discussed on various networks under wireline or wireless environment. Many research studies have been raised to help TCP be more sensitive to the network congestion by adding explicit notifications in TCP connection or letting the intermediate nodes in the network to join TCP congestion control. In GPRS/EGPRS systems and other 3G cellular networks, the radio network controller chooses among several channel coders according to the signal to interference ratio. Hence, the channel data rate that an individual user experiences is time-dependent and variable. We propose a TCP window control mechanism that adapts to the variable channel data rates. Our simulations show that the window adaptive TCP decreases the buffer occupancy and packet transmission delay, and achieves better throughput utilization when compared with the standard TCP Tahoe version and the Reno version.