A New Scheme to Improve Overall TCP Throughput with Vertical Handover between 3G Cellular Packet Networks and Wireless LANs

摘要

One major difference between 3G cellular networks and Wireless LANs is in how packet losses are dealt with. 3G cellular networks employ selective repeat ARQ (SR-ARQ) which may result in packet-reordering due to local retransmissions. Wireless LANs employ stop-and-wait ARQ which may drop some packets in case the buffer overflows. While much work has been performed for TCP throughput enhancement with vertical handover between wired networks and wireless networks, little attention is paid to the vertical handover between two different wireless networks. It is expected for majority of new mobile devices to be able to connect to both 3G cellular networks and wireless LANs by being equipped with multiple wireless interfaces. If this is the case, on-going TCP transmission may move between 3G cellular networks and wireless LANs. In this paper, we propose a scheme to improve TCP throughput with vertical handoff between 3G cellular networks and wireless LANs. For this we develop an algorithm which differentiates packet-reordering from packet losses and congestion losses from wireless losses. Simulation of our algorithm using ns-2 shows significant increase in throughput as large as 80% compared to TCP-SACK. The proposed scheme is able to respond to the change of loss pattern and then improve the TCP throughput during handover.