ECTCP: ENHANCED CONTROL TRANSMISSION CONTROL
PROTOCOL OVER WIRELESS NETWORKS
Abhishek Anand, Vidit Bansal, Garimella Rama Murthy
IIIT Hyderabad
rammurthy@iiit.net
{abhi_anand, vidit_bansal}@students.iiit.net.
The increasing popularity of wireless networks indicates that wireless links will play an important role in the future. A lot of
importance is being attached to supporting both data and voice applications over wireless networks. Transmission Control Protocol
(TCP) is the most commonly used protocol in wired networks. It is well-tuned to perform in wired networks as it readily adapts itself
to the network requirements. However wireless networks are fundamentally different from wired networks. In this paper we discuss
how TCP is unsuitable for mobile hosts and their wireless links. We discuss the effect of mobility on the performance of TCP and then
make a brief foray into some of the solutions which have been proposed. Thereafter we proceed to discuss a new protocol, look into
the intuition behind the way it is designed to address the problems which plague wireless networks. We discuss the theoretical aspects
related to this protocol, its functionality, strengths and weaknesses.
1. Introduction
Mobile networks and their wireless links are fundamentally different from conventional stationary, wired
computer networks. TCP however has been tuned to perform well in wired networks. TCP is a connection
oriented reliable protocol that adapts itself to network requirements. TCP is not able to respond to the
problems typically faced in wireless networks. We discuss these problems characteristic to wireless
networks in Section 3. Section4 looks into some of the solutions which have been proposed to improve
TCP performance over wireless links. Next in Section 5, we develop the theoretical foundations for our
protocol. We discuss its implementation, its advantages and disadvantages. Finally we conclude in Section
6 with results and recommendations for improvement
2. Background
2.1 Descripti