2012/07/04 by Youssef Bassil, Bassil, Youssef
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1207.1098
LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences, International Journal of Research and Reviews in Information Sciences (IJRRIS), Vol. 2, No. 2, June 2012, http://www.lacsc.org
arxiv created 2012/07/04 · openalex publication_date 2012/07/04 · arxiv updated 2012/07/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Currently, TCP is the most popular and widely used network transmission protocol. In actual fact, about 90% of connections on the internet use TCP to communicate. Through several upgrades and improvements, TCP became well optimized for the very reliable wired networks. As a result, TCP considers all packet timeouts in wired networks as due to network congestion and not to bit errors. However, with networking becoming more heterogeneous, providing wired as well as wireless topologies, TCP suffers from performance degradation over error-prone wireless links as it has no mechanism to differentiate error losses from congestion losses. It therefore considers all packet losses as due to congestion and consequently reduces the burst of packet, diminishing at the same time the network throughput. This paper proposes a new TCP congestion control scheme appropriate for wireless as well as wired networks and is capable of distinguishing congestion losses from error losses. The proposed scheme is based on using the reserved field of the TCP header to indicate whether the established connection is over a wired or a wireless link. Additionally, the proposed scheme leverages the SNR ratio to detect the reliability of the link and decide whether to reduce packet burst or retransmit a timed-out packet. Experiments conducted, revealed that the proposed scheme proved to behave correctly in situations where timeouts were due to error and not to congestion. Future work can improve upon the proposed scheme so much so that it can leverage CRC and HEC errors so as to better determine the cause of transmission timeouts in wireless networks.