A survey of performance enhancement of transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless ad hoc networks

This Article is provided by the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2011 Springer OpenTransmission control protocol (TCP), which provides reliable end-to-end data delivery, performs well in traditional wired network environments, while in wireless ad hoc networks, it does not perform well. Compared to wired networks, wireless ad hoc networks have some specific characteristics such as node mobility and a shared medium. Owing to these specific characteristics of wireless ad hoc networks, TCP faces particular problems with, for example, route failure, channel contention and high bit error rates. These factors are responsible for the performance degradation of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks. The research community has produced a wide range of proposals to improve the performance of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks. This article presents a survey of these proposals (approaches). A classification of TCP improvement proposals for wireless ad hoc networks is presented, which makes it easy to compare the proposals falling under the same category. Tables which summarize the approaches for quick overview are provided. Possible directions for further improvements in this area are suggested in the conclusions. The aim of the article is to enable the reader to quickly acquire an overview of the state of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks.This study is partly funded by Kohat University of Science & Technology (KUST), Pakistan, and the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan

Signal Strength Based Congestion Control in In MANET

All nodes in MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) are mobile and dynamically connected in an arbitrary manner.  Mobility causes frequent link failure which results in packet losses. TCP assumes that these packet losses are due to congestion only. This wrong assumption requires packet retransmissions till packet arrives successfully at the receiver. Goal is to improve TCP performance by using signal strength based cross layer approach which obviously resolves the congestion. We are reviewing a signal strength based measurements to improve such packet losses and no need to retransmit packets. Node based and link based signal strength can be measured. If a link fails due to mobility, then signal strength measurement provides temporary higher transmission power to keep link alive. When a route is likely to fail due to weak signal strength of a node, it will find alternate path. consequently avoids congestion. We will make changes at MAC routing and routing layer to predict link failure. MANET hits the protocol's strength due to its highly dynamic features, thus in testing a protocol suitable for MANET implementation we have selected two routing protocols AODV and DSR. Packet Delivery Ratio, Packet Drop, Throughput and end to end delay are the metrics used for performance analysis of the AODV routing protocols. Keywords: Congestion  control, Signal strength, TCP performance ,Cross layer interaction, Route discover

Decisive analysis of current state of the art in congestion aware and control routing models in ad hoc networks

An important aspect that portrays a crucial position in the ad hoc network routing is congestion. Almost every research analysis is en-route in adapting this key factor in addressing congestion. This problem cannot be totally addressed by the regular TCP protocol based networks, keeping in view the special assets which include multi hop sharing etc, which is difficult to ascertain in ad hoc networks. Many attempts have been made and are in progress by researchers to provide unique solutions to the above mentioned problems. This paper projects a vital study on jamming aware and different routing standards that have been dealt with in recent times

An Efficient Framework of Congestion Control for Next-Generation Networks

The success of the Internet can partly be attributed to the congestion control algorithm in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). However, with the tremendous increase in the diversity of networked systems and applications, TCP performance limitations are becoming increasingly problematic and the need for new transport protocol designs has become increasingly important.Prior research has focused on the design of either end-to-end protocols (e.g., CUBIC) that rely on implicit congestion signals such as loss and/or delay or network-based protocols (e.g., XCP) that use precise per-flow feedback from the network. While the former category of schemes haveperformance limitations, the latter are hard to deploy, can introduce high per-packet overhead, and open up new security challenges. This dissertation explores the middle ground between these designs and makes four contributions. First, we study the interplay between performance and feedback in congestion control protocols. We argue that congestion feedback in the form of aggregate load can provide the richness needed to meet the challenges of next-generation networks and applications. Second, we present the design, analysis, and evaluation of an efficient framework for congestion control called Binary Marking Congestion Control (BMCC). BMCC uses aggregate load feedback to achieve efficient and fair bandwidth allocations on high bandwidth-delaynetworks while minimizing packet loss rates and average queue length. BMCC reduces flow completiontimes by up to 4x over TCP and uses only the existing Explicit Congestion Notification bits.Next, we consider the incremental deployment of BMCC. We study the bandwidth sharing properties of BMCC and TCP over different partial deployment scenarios. We then present algorithms for ensuring safe co-existence of BMCC and TCP on the Internet. Finally, we consider the performance of BMCC over Wireless LANs. We show that the time-varying nature of the capacity of a WLAN can lead to significant performance issues for protocols that require capacity estimates for feedback computation. Using a simple model we characterize the capacity of a WLAN and propose the usage of the average service rate experienced by network layer packets as an estimate for capacity. Through extensive evaluation, we show that the resulting estimates provide good performance

Achieving Soft Real-time Guarantees for Interactive Applications in Wireless Mesh Networks

The use of 802.11-based multi-hop wireless mesh networks for Internet access is extensive and growing. The primary advantages of this approach are ease of deployment and lower cost. However, these networks are designed for web and e-mail applications. Highly interactive applications, such as multiplayer online games and VoIP, with their requirements for low delay, present significant challenges to these networks. In particular, the interaction between real-time traffic and TCP traffic tends to result in either a failure of the real-time traffic getting its needed QoS or the TCP traffic unnecessarily experiencing very poor throughput. To solve this problem we place real-time and TCP traffic into separate queues. We then rate-limit TCP traffic based on the average queue size of the local or remote real-time queues. Thus, TCP traffic is permitted to use excess bandwidth as long as it does not interfere with real-time traffic guarantees. We therefore call our scheme Real-time Queue-based Rate and Admission Control, RtQ-RAC. Extensive simulations using the network simulator, ns-2, demonstrate that our approach is effective in providing soft real-time support, while allowing efficient use of the remaining bandwidth for TCP traffic

Enhancing TCP Performance in Mobile Ad Hoc Network Using Explicit Link Failure Notification (ELFN)

The dynamics and the unpredictable behaviour of a wireless mobile ad hoc network results in the hindrance of providing adequate reliability to network connections. Frequent route changes in the network relatively introduce incessant link failures which eventually degrade TCP performance considerably. In this research, we are going to study the potential improvement of TCP performance when Explicit Link Failure Notification is implemented as opposed to the standard TCP mechanism. ELFN modifies the ‘slow start’ mechanism that is used in standard TCP so that the throughput achieved from the network can be maximized

TCP Performance in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

In this paper, we present a survey of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) protocol for better performance in the MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc Network). After a short presentation of the main features of TCP, we give the most important problems from which TCP suffer in MANET. We present after that some approaches proposed in the literature in order to improve its performance. Our paper contains also a performance evaluation of TCP NewReno and TCP Vegas transport protocols under AODV and DSR routing protocols. The simulations are conducted under varying conditions of number of TCP connections, number of nodes and mobility.Hamrioui, S.; Lloret, J.; Lorenz, P.; Lalam, M. (2013). TCP Performance in Mobile Ad hoc Networks. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 5(4):117-142. doi:10.5296/npa.v5i4.4773S1171425