TCP-AP Enhanced Behaviour With rt-Winf And Node Count: boosted-TCP-AP

Abstract

Congestion control in wireless networks is strongly dependent on the dynamics and instability of wireless links. Therefore, it is very difficult to accurately evaluate the characteristics of the wireless links. It is known that TCP experiences serious performance degradation problems in wireless networks. New congestion control mechanisms, such as TCP-AP, do not evaluate accurately the capacity and available link bandwidth in wireless networks. In this paper we propose new congestion control protocol for wireless networks, based in TCP-AP. We name the protocol boosted-TCP-AP. It relies on the MAC layer information gathered by a new method to accurately estimate the available bandwidth and the path capacity over a wireless network path (rt-Winf), and also takes into consideration the node path count. The new congestion control mechanism is evaluated in different scenarios in wireless mesh and ad-hoc networks, and compared against several new approaches for wireless congestion control. It is shown that boosted-TCP-AP outperforms the base TCP-AP, showing its stable behavior and better channel utilization.