Tcp Performance Optimization In Interaction With Mac Layer Over Multi-Hop Ad-Hoc Networks

Transport Control Protocol (TCP) has been designed to provide reliable data delivery between end hosts in traditional wired networks and is the most widely used reliable transport protocol over the internet. TCP keeps looking at the traffic inside the network by employing the congestion control mechanisms. The basic assumption underlying TCP congestion control is that packet losses are an indication of congestion in the wired network. The effect of such an assumption on TCP's performance in wireless environments has been a long-standing research study. The reason is specific wireless properties such as high medium access contention; route breakage and high bit error rate in radio channels pose different challenges in TCP performance when it runs over wireless networks. In this thesis, the focus is given on the interaction between TCP and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer in multi-hop ad-hoc networks to deal with the effect of high medium access contention on TCP throughput. The main problem of TCP over IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is the extensive number of medium access carried out by TCP. In fact, TCP sender will be informed of successful transmissions by receiving the acknowledgment (ACK) from the other end host to achieve the reliability. In this way, the MAC overhead may be caused by generating redundant ACK packets that compete in the same route with data packets for the media. As the load increases, the well-known hidden terminal effects caused by interference between ACK and data packets can degrade TCP performance dramatically if TCP acknowledges every incoming data packets. To address above problem, in this thesis a dynamic TCP-MAC interaction strategy is proposed which tries to reduce the number of induced ACKs by monitoring the channel condition. To this end, the total collision probability collected along the path from sender to receiver in MAC layer is used to properly set the number of the delayed ACKs (DA) in TCP. Based on the measured collision probability, TCP sender dynamically adjusts itself to the channel condition by delaying less ACKs in high traffics and more in low traffic conditions. Upon this strategy, an enhanced TCP throughput has been achieved in trade-off between moderate and high traffics. Finally, the relationship between the TCP throughput and optimized number of delayed ACKs has been investigated in different hop counts scenarios which employ a dynamic traffic. The findings show that for a given hop count, there exists an optimized delay window size which maximizes the TCP throughput. Overall, the achieved throughput increments are up to about 30% over the regular TCP with DA extension and cwnd limit and about 10% over the existing method called Dynamic Adaptive Acknowledgment (TCP-DAA and TCP-DAAp)

Design and evaluation of protocols for wireless networks taking into account the interaction between transport and network layers.

We recognized two important shortcomings of the current TCP protocol: misinterpretation of delayed acknowledgments and competition among different TCP flows. In this dissertation, we propose to address these two issues by a use of novel protocol that uses immediate and delayed acknowledgment schemes and provides a coordination mechanism among independent TCP flows. We also address certain important issues that are related to the implementation of our proposed protocol: can we maintain the end-to-end semantics of TCP? Are there additional benefits that can be harvested if intermediate nodes with TCP protocol can be used? (Abstract shortened by UMI.)The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides end-to-end data reliability and is the primary transport layer protocol for many applications such as email, web access, and file transfer. There has been a plethora of research activity that aims to improve the performance of TCP both in wired and wireless networks. Protocols for the computer networks have been very structured and layered to allow for easier upgrades and maintenance. The network layer protocol (e.g. IP) is independent and below the transport layer protocol (e.g. TCP). Our main goal in this dissertation is to examine the interaction and dynamics between the network layer protocols and TCP in the wireless environment.Towards this goal, we examined the network layer protocols in one-hop wireless (e.g. cellular networks) and multi-hop wireless, e.g. distributed Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) networks. For each of these networks we, for the first time, propose transport layer protocols that take into account the interaction between the network layer and transport layer. For the one-hop wireless networks we have investigated analytical methods to determine the buffer requirements at base stations and estimate disruption time which is the time between two packet arrivals at the mobile host. We will show that the estimation of buffer requirements and disruption time is not only dependent on the wireless TCP scheme used, but also its interaction with the underlying network protocol. We also propose a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of wireless TCP and network protocols taking into account different networking environments that is decided on many factors such as mobility of senders and receivers, simplex and duplex communication among communicating peers, connection oriented and connection less communication at the network layer, rerouting schemes used after movement, and with and without hint handoff schemes

MANETs: Internet Connectivity and Transport Protocols

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes connected together over a wireless medium, which self-organize into an autonomous multi-hop wireless network. This kind of networks allows people and devices to seamlessly internetwork in areas with no pre-existing communication infrastructure, e.g., disaster recovery environments. Ad hoc networking is not a new concept, having been around in various forms for over 20 years. However, in the past only tactical networks followed the ad hoc networking paradigm. Recently, the introduction of new technologies such as IEEE 802.11, are moved the application field of MANETs to a more commercial field. These evolutions have been generating a renewed and growing interest in the research and development of MANETs. It is widely recognized that a prerequisite for the commercial penetration of the ad hoc networking technologies is the integration with existing wired/wireless infrastructure-based networks to provide an easy and transparent access to the Internet and its services. However, most of the existing solutions for enabling the interconnection between MANETs and the Internet are based on complex and inefficient mechanisms, as Mobile-IP and IP tunnelling. This thesis describes an alternative approach to build multi-hop and heterogeneous proactive ad hoc networks, which can be used as flexible and low-cost extensions of traditional wired LANs. The proposed architecture provides transparent global Internet connectivity and address autocofiguration capabilities to mobile nodes without requiring configuration changes in the pre-existing wired LAN, and relying on basic layer-2 functionalities. This thesis also includes an experimental evaluation of the proposed architecture and a comparison between this architecture with a well-known alternative NAT-based solution. The experimental outcomes confirm that the proposed technique ensures higher per-connection throughputs than the NAT-based solution. This thesis also examines the problems encountered by TCP over multi-hop ad hoc networks. Research on efficient transport protocols for ad hoc networks is one of the most active topics in the MANET community. Such a great interest is basically motivated by numerous observations showing that, in general, TCP is not able to efficiently deal with the unstable and very dynamic environment provided by multi-hop ad hoc networks. This is because some assumptions, in TCP design, are clearly inspired by the characteristics of wired networks dominant at the time when it was conceived. More specifically, TCP implicitly assumes that packet loss is almost always due to congestion phenomena causing buffer overflows at intermediate routers. Furthermore, it also assumes that nodes are static (i.e., they do not change their position over time). Unfortunately, these assumptions do not hold in MANETs, since in this kind of networks packet losses due to interference and link-layer contentions are largely predominant, and nodes may be mobile. The typical approach to solve these problems is patching TCP to fix its inefficiencies while preserving compatibility with the original protocol. This thesis explores a different approach. Specifically, this thesis presents a new transport protocol (TPA) designed from scratch, and address TCP interoperability at a late design stage. In this way, TPA can include all desired features in a neat and coherent way. This thesis also includes an experimental, as well as, a simulative evaluation of TPA, and a comparison between TCP and TPA performance (in terms of throughput, number of unnecessary transmissions and fairness). The presented analysis considers several of possible configurations of the protocols parameters, different routing protocols, and various networking scenarios. In all the cases taken into consideration TPA significantly outperforms TCP

Computational Intelligence Inspired Data Delivery for Vehicle-to-Roadside Communications

We propose a vehicle-to-roadside communication protocol based on distributed clustering where a coalitional game approach is used to stimulate the vehicles to join a cluster, and a fuzzy logic algorithm is employed to generate stable clusters by considering multiple metrics of vehicle velocity, moving pattern, and signal qualities between vehicles. A reinforcement learning algorithm with game theory based reward allocation is employed to guide each vehicle to select the route that can maximize the whole network performance. The protocol is integrated with a multi-hop data delivery virtualization scheme that works on the top of the transport layer and provides high performance for multi-hop end-to-end data transmissions. We conduct realistic computer simulations to show the performance advantage of the protocol over other approaches

An Energy-conscious Transport Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

We present a transport protocol whose goal is to reduce power consumption without compromising delivery requirements of applications. To meet its goal of energy efficiency, our transport protocol (1) contains mechanisms to balance end-to-end vs. local retransmissions; (2) minimizes acknowledgment traffic using receiver regulated rate-based flow control combined with selected acknowledgements and in-network caching of packets; and (3) aggressively seeks to avoid any congestion-based packet loss. Within a recently developed ultra low-power multi-hop wireless network system, extensive simulations and experimental results demonstrate that our transport protocol meets its goal of preserving the energy efficiency of the underlying network.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (NBCHC050053