Stabilizing TCP performance over bursty wireless links through the combined use of link-layer techniques

Improving TCP performance over wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks is recognized as a crucial issue, specially in those links prone to suffer from high bit error rate (BER) and bursty error losses. This paper shows how TCP throughput over a real IEEE 802.11b wireless local area network (WLAN) in a lossy office environment is stabilized by a combination of an adaptive forward error correction (FEC) scheme in conjunction with a Snoop agent, both added to the idle repeat request (RQ) mechanism inherently used by such technology. The most innovative aspects of this work are that these techniques operate simultaneously and they have been tested over a real scenario.