An Efficient Transport Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks: An End-to-End Freeze TCP with Timestamps

In ad hoc networks, loss-based congestion window progression by the traditional means of duplicate ACKs and timeouts causes high network buffer utilization due to large bursts of data, thereby degrading network bandwidth utilization. Moreover, network-oriented feedbacks to handle route disconnection events may impair packet forwarding capability by adding to MAC layer congestion and also dissipate considerable network resources at reluctant intermediate nodes. Here, we propose a new TCP scheme that does not require the participation of intermediate nodes. It is a purely end-to-end scheme using TCP timestamps to deduce link conditions. It also eliminates spurious reductions of the transmission window in cases of timeouts and fast retransmits. The scheme incorporates a receiver-oriented rate controller (rater), and a congestion window delimiter for the 802.11 MAC protocol. In addition, the transient nature of medium availability due to medium contention during the connection time is addressed by a freezing timer (freezer) at the receiver, which freezes the sender whenever heavy contention is perceived. Finally, the sender-end is modified to comply with the receiver-end enhancements, as an optional deployment. Simulation studies show that our modification of TCP for ad hoc networks offers outstanding performance in terms of goodput, as well as throughput.