Detecting TCP Retransmission Timeouts Non-related to Congestion in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks
TCP s performance significantly degrades in multi hop wireless networks because TCP s retransmission timeouts (RTOs) are frequently triggered regardless of congestion due to sudden delay and wireless transmission errors Such RTOs non related to congestions lead to TCP s unnecessary behaviors such as retransmitting all the outstanding packets which might be located in the bottleneck queue or reducing sharply its sending rate and increasing exponentially its back off value even when the network is not congested Since traditional TCP has no ability to identify if a RTO is triggered by congestion or not it is unavoidable for TCP to underutilize available bandwidth by blindly reducing its sending rate for all the RTOs In this piper we propose an algorithm to detect the RTOs non related to congestion in order to let TCP respond to the RTOs differently according to the cause When a RTO is triggered our algorithm estimates the queue usage in the network path during the go back N retransmissions and decides if the RTO is triggered by congestion or not when the retransmissions end If any RTO non related to congestion is detected our algorithm prevents TCP from increasing unnecessarily its back off value as well as reducing needlessly its sending rate Throughout the extensive simulation scenarios we observed how frequently RTOs are triggered regardless of congestion and evaluated our algorithm in terms of accuracy and goodput The experiment results show that our algorithm has the highest accuracy among the previous works and the performance enhancement reaches up to 70% when our algorithm is applied to TCP
wireless networks multi hop rtos non related to congestion tcp retransnmission timeouts