TCP Westwood: bandwidth estimation for enhanced transport over wireless links

TCP Westwood (TCPW) is a sender-side modification of the TCP congestion window algorithm that improves upon the performance of TCP Reno in wired as well as wireless networks. The improvement is most significant in wireless networks with lossy links, since TCP Westwood relies on end-to-end bandwidth estimation to discriminate the cause of packet loss (congestion or wireless channel effect) which is a major problem in TCP Reno. An important distinguishing feature of TCP Westwood with respect to previous wireless TCP “extensions ” is that it does not require inspection and/or interception of TCP packets at intermediate (proxy) nodes. Rather, it fully complies with the end-to-end TCP design principle. The key innovative idea is to continuously measure at the TCP source the rate of the connection by monitoring th