TCP NRT: a new TCP algorithm for differentiating non-congestion retransmission timeouts over multihop wireless networks

Abstract

In multihop wireless networks, reliable data transfer is one of the most difficult tasks. When transmission control protocol (TCP) operates in multihop wireless networks, the performance of TCP reduces drastically. TCP retransmission timeouts (RTOs) related to non-congestion events such as spurious and random packet losses have been reported as one of the main problems in the performance degradation of TCP in multihop wireless networks. The RTOs triggered by random packet losses due to transmission errors lead to unnecessary reduction of TCP congestion window size, and the spurious RTOs due to sudden delay of packets on the network paths often cause unnecessary retransmissions as well as reduction of congestion window size. Existing solutions for detecting non-congestion RTOs have no mechanism to differentiate the spurious RTOs from RTOs caused by random packet loss. In this paper, we introduce an efficient algorithm called non-congestion retransmission timeouts (TCP NRT) which is capable of recovering packets after RTOs by reducing unnecessary retransmissions and needless reduction of congestion window size in order to improve the performance of TCP in multihop wireless networks. TCP NRT consists of three key components: NRT-detection, NRT-differentiation, and NRT-reaction. We implemented the algorithm in Qualnet network simulator and compared its performance to existing TCP versions. Results from the experiments show that our algorithm achieves significant performance improvement in terms of throughput and accuracy. Also, the results showed that our algorithm, TCP NRT, maintains a fair and friendly behavior compared to the most widely deployed TCP, NewReno.