Adapting TCP to Wireless Links
Saad Biaz


Abstract:

TCP is a popular transport protocol used in present-day Internet.
Popular applications such as FTP, HTTP (Web), and Telnet use it.
TCP was designed and tuned for networks where losses are mainly due
to congestion. When packet losses occur, TCP assumes that the packet
losses are due to congestion, and responds by reducing its "sending
rate".  However, when a TCP connection traverses a wireless link, a
significant fraction of packet losses may occur due to transmission
errors. TCP responds unduly to such losses also by reducing its
"sending rate". This results in unnecessary degradation in TCP
performance.

Our work aims to design a loss discriminator which can diagnose with
high accuracy the real cause of a loss : congestion or corruption.
Depending on this determination, the TCP sender can take actions
appropriate for the actual type of loss.
 
In this seminar, I will broadly describe this area of research that
tries to adapt TCP to heterogeneous networks (i.e., networks with
wired and wireless links).