Intelligent wireless management: Improving TCP performance over wireless networks.

摘要

The standard TCP protocol is optimized for performance on highly reliable wired networks. When TCP is used on relatively unreliable wireless networks, wireless errors are visible in the transport level and are treated as congestion. Significant performance problems emerge in this scenario.; The goals of this dissertation are to define, implement and evaluate modifications to TCP that improve throughput performance over wireless networks. A link layer/end-to-end combination is designed and implemented to provide the best throughput performance under adverse wireless conditions. This combination is utilized to concentrate predominantly on mechanisms which focus on errors due to the wireless link and how these mechanisms are adapted in certain situations. In addition, an Intelligent Wireless Management (IWM) knowledge base meta-layer is created that maintains the characteristics of the wireless link and executes modifications to the TCP source and link layer protocol based on the information that is received.; An evaluation of performance follows the design and implementation of these two techniques. Experiments using these approaches are conducted using the network simulator (ns) and it is concluded that the overall performance of TCP is significantly improved by using a link layer/end-to-end approach with an IWM knowledge base meta-layer. The improvements in performance over the standard protocols range from 24% to over 100%.