Wireless TCP Model for Short-Lived Flows

Abstract — TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is one of most important Internet protocols. It provides reliable transport services between two end-hosts. Since TCP performance affects overall network performance, many studies have been done to model TCP performance in the steady state. However, recent re-search has shown that most TCP flows are short-lived. Therefore, it is more meaningful to model TCP performance in relation to the initial stage of short-lived flows. In addition, the next generation Internet will be unified all-IP network that includes both wireless and wired networks integrated together. In short, modeling short-lived TCP flows in wireless networks constitutes an important axis of research. In this paper, we propose a simple wireless TCP model for short-lived flows that extends the existing model proposed in [1]. In terms of wireless TCP, we categorized wireless TCP schemes into three types: end-to-end schemes, split connection schemes, and local retransmission schemes, which is similar to the classification proposed in [3]. To evaluate the performance of the proposed models, we performed several sim-ulations. The average differences between the calculated session completion time and the simulation result for three schemes are less than 9msec, 16msec, and 7msec, respectively. Consequently, the proposed model provides a satisfactory means of modeling the TCP performance of short-lived wireless TCP flows. Index Terms — Wireless TCP, Short-lived flow, TCP Modeling. I