Using path prediction to improve TCP performance in wireless/mobile communications

The operation of TCP in wireless mobile environments is discussed. After presenting previous efforts to ameliorate TCP performance in the considered environments, we propose a new mechanism for tackling the transmission slowdown problems caused by handovers. Our proposal is based on stochastic datagram relocation. Traffic destined to the mobile terminal is tunneled to and cached into adjacent cells according to the output of a path prediction algorithm. To reduce the associated overhead, only percentages of inbound traffic are copied to the cell´s neighborhood on the basis of estimated probabilities. The time scheduling for datagram relocation is also taken into account. Simulations of the proposed architecture show substantial performance improvements for TCP traffic.