ATCP: TCP for mobile ad hoc networks

Transport connections set up in wireless ad hoc networks are plagued by problems such as high bit error rates (BER), frequent route changes and partitions. If we run TCP over such connections, the throughput of the connection is observed to be extremely poor because TCP treats lost or delayed ACKs as congestion. In this paper we present an approach where we implement a thin layer between IP and standard TCP that corrects these problems and maintains high end-to-end TCP throughput. We have implemented our protocol in FreeBSD and in this paper we present results from extensive experimentation done in an ad hoc network. We show that our solution improves TCP's throughput by a factor of 2 { 3.