Reliable Stream Transmission in Mobile Computing Environments

Providing reliable stream transmission in the IP-based mobile computing environment is a major difficulty in the development of a practical mobile Internet system [B3C94], [MS93], [I93]. In this paper, we propose a protocol for the reliable stream transmission in the mobile computing environment. By caching packets passing through the base station, we can not only establish the connection of the reliable stream transmission between the mobile host and its partner in the Internet, but can also guarantee the normal behavior of the TCP protocol in the Internet. Minimizing the computational overhead of the packet interception at the base stations is another effort in the paper. We are expecting that the overall communication performance is going to be improved, although the caching overhead exists at the base station, as indicated by the mathematical model in the paper. Key Words: Reliable Stream Transmission, TCP, Packet Loss Rate, Communication Latency, Data Caching. 1.0 Intr..