A cross-layer mechanism for TCP connection over wireless uplink in cellular networks

In the next generation cellular radio networks (e.g. 4G), the first hop in the uplink that is from the mobile host (MH) to the fix host (FH) is the wireless link and transport control protocol (TCP) is used for data transfer over the end-to-end connection. However, TCP performs poorly in wireless networks. In the paper, a novel cross-layer mechanism called link layer trigger TCP (LLT-TCP) for TCP over radio uplink is presented. The proposed scheme controls the startup of the retransmission timer in TCP layer at the MH according to the information from the radio link control (RLC) layer, which enables TCP protocol to operate over the uplink without suffering from the packet losses resulting from the fading channel and mobility. In addition, the implementation of proposed mechanism only needs to make modifications on the protocol stack in MH.