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

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

Service differentiation in multihop wireless packet networks

This work explores the potential of link layer scheduling combined with MAC layer prioritization for providing service differentiation in multihop wireless packet networks. As a result of limited power, multihop characteristic and mobility, packet loss ratio in wireless ad hoc networks tends to be high compared to wireline and one-hop mobile data networks. Therefore, for wireless ad hoc networks, DiffServ-like distributed service differentiation schemes are more viable than hard QoS solutions, which are mainly designed for wireline networks. The choice and implementation of proper queuing and scheduling methods, which determine how packets will use the channel when bandwidth becomes available, contributes significantly to this differentiation. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication, media access is one of the main resources that needs to be shared among different flows. Thus, one can design and implement algorithms also at MAC level for service differentiation. In this study, in addition to the scheduling discipline, IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function is used to increase the media access probability of a specific class of traffic. It is shown that the service requirements of a class can be better met using this two level approach compared to the cases where either of these schemes used alone

TCP performance enhancement in wireless networks via adaptive congestion control and active queue management

The transmission control protocol (TCP) exhibits poor performance when used in error-prone wireless networks. Remedy to this problem has been an active research area. However, a widely accepted and adopted solution is yet to emerge. Difficulties of an acceptable solution lie in the areas of compatibility, scalability, computational complexity and the involvement of intermediate routers and switches. This dissertation rexriews the current start-of-the-art solutions to TCP performance enhancement, and pursues an end-to-end solution framework to the problem. The most noticeable cause of the performance degradation of TCP in wireless networks is the higher packet loss rate as compared to that in traditional wired networks. Packet loss type differentiation has been the focus of many proposed TCP performance enhancement schemes. Studies conduced by this dissertation research suggest that besides the standard TCP\u27s inability of discriminating congestion packet losses from losses related to wireless link errors, the standard TCP\u27s additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD) congestion control algorithm itself needs to be redesigned to achieve better performance in wireless, and particularly, high-speed wireless networks. This dissertation proposes a simple, efficient, and effective end-to-end solution framework that enhances TCP\u27s performance through techniques of adaptive congestion control and active queue management. By end-to-end, it means a solution with no requirement of routers being wireless-aware or wireless-specific . TCP-Jersey has been introduced as an implementation of the proposed solution framework, and its performance metrics have been evaluated through extensive simulations. TCP-Jersey consists of an adaptive congestion control algorithm at the source by means of the source\u27s achievable rate estimation (ARE) —an adaptive filter of packet inter-arrival times, a congestion indication algorithm at the links (i.e., AQM) by means of packet marking, and a effective loss differentiation algorithm at the source by careful examination of the congestion marks carried by the duplicate acknowledgment packets (DUPACK). Several improvements to the proposed TCP-Jersey have been investigated, including a more robust ARE algorithm, a less computationally intensive threshold marking algorithm as the AQM link algorithm, a more stable congestion indication function based on virtual capacity at the link, and performance results have been presented and analyzed via extensive simulations of various network configurations. Stability analysis of the proposed ARE-based additive increase and adaptive decrease (AJAD) congestion control algorithm has been conducted and the analytical results have been verified by simulations. Performance of TCP-Jersey has been compared to that of a perfect , but not practical, TCP scheme, and encouraging results have been observed. Finally the framework of the TCP-Jersey\u27s source algorithm has been extended and generalized for rate-based congestion control, as opposed to TCP\u27s window-based congestion control, to provide a design platform for applications, such as real-time multimedia, that do not use TCP as transport protocol yet do need to control network congestion as well as combat packet losses in wireless networks. In conclusion, the framework architecture presented in this dissertation that combines the adaptive congestion control and active queue management in solving the TCP performance degradation problem in wireless networks has been shown as a promising answer to the problem due to its simplistic design philosophy complete compatibility with the current TCP/IP and AQM practice, end-to-end architecture for scalability, and the high effectiveness and low computational overhead. The proposed implementation of the solution framework, namely TCP-Jersey is a modification of the standard TCP protocol rather than a completely new design of the transport protocol. It is an end-to-end approach to address the performance degradation problem since it does not require split mode connection establishment and maintenance using special wireless-aware software agents at the routers. The proposed solution also differs from other solutions that rely on the link layer error notifications for packet loss differentiation. The proposed solution is also unique among other proposed end-to-end solutions in that it differentiates packet losses attributed to wireless link errors from congestion induced packet losses directly from the explicit congestion indication marks in the DUPACK packets, rather than inferring the loss type based on packet delay or delay jitter as in many other proposed solutions; nor by undergoing a computationally expensive off-line training of a classification model (e.g., HMM), or a Bayesian estimation/detection process that requires estimations of a priori loss probability distributions of different loss types. The proposed solution is also scalable and fully compatible to the current practice in Internet congestion control and queue management, but with an additional function of loss type differentiation that effectively enhances TCP\u27s performance over error-prone wireless networks. Limitations of the proposed solution architecture and areas for future researches are also addressed

A Survey on Issues and Challenges in Congestion Adaptive Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Network

Mobile ad hoc networks is the future wireless communication systems have recently emerged as an important trend. Mobile adhoc network is self-configurable and adaptive. Due to the mobility of nodes, the network congestion occurs and it is difficult to predict load on the network which leads to congestion. Mobile adhoc network suffers from a severe congestion controlling problem due to the nature of shared communication and mobility. Standard TCP controlling mechanism for congestion is not fit to the dynamic changing topology of MANETs. This provides a wide scope of research work in mobile ad hoc network. The purpose of this survey is to study and analyze various issues and challenges in congestion control mechanisms in adaptive routing protocols in Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET)