Enhancing TCP Performance over Wireless Network with Variable Segment Size

TCP, which was developed on the basis of wired links, supposes that packet losses are caused by network congestion. In a wireless network, however, packet losses due to data corruption occur frequently. Since TCP does not distinguish loss types, it applies its congestion control mechanism to non-congestion losses as well as congestion losses. As a result, the throughput of TCP is degraded. To solve this problem of TCP over wireless links, previous researches, such as split-connection and end-to-end schemes, tried to distinguish the loss types and applied the congestion control to only congestion losses; yet they do nothing for non-congestion losses. We propose a novel transport protocol for wireless networks. The protocol called VS-TCP (Variable Segment size Transmission Control Protocol) has a reaction mechanism for a non-congestion loss. VS-TCP varies a segment size according to a non-congestion loss rate, and therefore enhances the performance. If packet losses due to data corruption occur frequently, VS-TCP decreases a segment size in order to reduce both the retransmission overhead and packet corruption probability. If packets are rarely lost, it increases the size so as to lower the header overhead. Via simulations, we compared VS-TCP and other schemes. Our results show that the segment-size variation mechanism of VS-TCP achieves a substantial performance enhancement.