Delayed Duplicate Acknowledgements: A TCP-Unaware Approach to Improve Performance of TCP over Wireless

Since TCP cannot distinguish between packet losses due to transmission errors from those due to congestion, TCP tends to perform poorly on wireless links that are prone to transmission errors. Several techniques have previously been proposed to improve TCP performance over wireless links. Existing schemes typically require an intermediate node (typically, a base station) to be TCP-aware. For instance, the Snoop scheme requires the base station to interpret TCP headers and take appropriate actions to help improve TCP performance. This paper proposes an alternative TCP-unaware technique that attempts to mimic the behavior of the Snoop protocol. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed Delayed Dupacks scheme performs quite well. 1 Introduction Wireless networking has gained widespread acceptance in recent years [11, 12, 23, 24]. The increasing use of wireless communication makes it interesting to consider issues related to the performance of transport protocols over wireless links...