The stability of the Internet depends on the presence of well-behaved flows. While TCP forms the majority of the traffic over the Internet, the Internet user community is also dedicated to supporting mobile devices over wireless networks. However, TCP is not well suited to support applications over lossy wireless networks. Ideally, these applications require a protocol that adapts to network conditions with the ability to discriminate congestion-based and transmission-based losses.
In this paper, we present a rate-based transport protocol that is designed to support communication for mobile nodes using infrastructure-based wireless networks. We propose an end-to-end approach to loss discrimination based on network state estimation at the receiver. Discrimination is achieved by correlating short-term history of packet inter-arrival times with the loss. We also integrate a congestion avoidance algorithm to react to pending network congestion. Simulations of our protocol prototype show that rate-based protocols can provide better correlation to network conditions than ACK-clocked protocols. We provide extensive evaluation through simulation demonstrating that our protocol is well-behaved over a wide range of scenarios
