Abstract. Wireless wide-area networks (WWANs) are characterized by very low and variable bandwidths, very high and variable delays, significant non-congestion related losses, asymmetric uplink and downlink channels, and occasional blackouts. Additionally, the majority of the latency in a WWAN connection is incurred over the wireless link. Under such operating conditions, most contemporary wireless TCP algorithms do not perform very well. In this paper, we present WTCP, a reliable transport protocol that addresses rate control and reliability over commercial WWAN networks such as CDPD. WTCP is rate-based, uses only end-to-end mechanisms, performs rate control at the receiver, and uses inter-packet delays as the primary metric for rate control. We have implemented and evaluated WTCP over the CDPD network, and also simulated it in the ns-2 simulator. Our results indicate that WTCP can improve on the performance of comparable algorithms such as TCP-NewReno, TCP-Vegas, and Snoop-TCP by between 20 % to 200 % for typical operating conditions.

This paper studies TCP performance in a stationary multihop wireless network using IEEE 802.11 for channel access control. We first show that given a specific network topology and flow patterns, there exists an optimal window size W # at which TCP achieves the highest throughput via maximum spatial reuse of the shared wireless channel. However, TCP grows its window size much larger than W # , leading to throughput reduction. We then explain the TCP throughput decrease using our observations and analysis of the packet loss in an overloaded multihop wireless network. We find out that the network overload is typically first signified by packet drops due to wireless link-layer contention, rather than buffer overflow-induced losses observed in the wired Internet. As the offered load increases, the probability of packet drops due to link contention also increases, and eventually saturates. Unfortunately, the link-layer drop probability is insufficient to keep the TCP window size around W # . We model and analyze the link contention behavior, based on which we propose Link RED that fine-tunes the link-layer packet dropping probability to stabilize the TCP window size around W # . We further devise Adaptive Pacing to better coordinate channel access along the packet forwarding path. Our simulations demonstrate 5% to 30% improvement of TCP throughput using the proposed two techniques.

In mobile computing, power is a limited resource. Like other devices, communication devices need to be properly managed to conserve energy. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an innovative transport level protocol capable of significantly reduc- ing the power usage of the communication device. The protocol achieves power savings by selectively choosing short periods of time to suspend communications and shut down the communication device. It manages the important task of queuing data for future delivery during periods of communication suspension, and decides when to restart communication. We also address the tradeoff between reducing power consumption and reducing delay for incoming data.

As the cellular and PCS world collides with Wireless LANs and Internet-based packet data, new networking approaches will support the integration of voice and data on the composite infrastructure of cellular base stations and Ethernet-based wireless access points. This paper highlights some of the past accomplishments and promising research avenues for an important topic in the creation of future wireless networks. In this paper, we address the issue of cross-layer networking, where the physical and MAC layer knowledge of the wireless medium is shared with higher layers, in order to provide efficient methods of allocating network resources and applications over the Internet. In essence, future networks will need to provide ”impedance matching ” of the instantaneous radio channel conditions and capacity needs with the traffic and congestion conditions found over the packet-based world of the Internet. Further, such matching will need to be coordinated with a wide range of particular applications and user expectations, making the topic of cross-layer networking an increasingly important one for the evolving wireless build-out. 1

Existing wireless ad hoc routing protocols typically find routes with the minimum hop-count. This paper presents experimental evidence from two wireless test-beds which shows that there are usually multiple minimum hop-count paths, many of which have poor throughput. As a result, minimum-hop-count routing often chooses routes that have significantly less capacity than the best paths that exist in the network. Much of the reason for this is that many of the radio links between nodes have loss rates low enough that the routing protocol is willing to use them, but high enough that much of the capacity is consumed by retransmissions. These observations suggest that more attention be paid to link quality when choosing ad hoc routes; the paper presents measured link characteristics likely to be useful in devising a better path quality metric.

this paper, we present the design and implementation of an innovative transport level protocol capable of significantly reducing the power usage of the communication device. The protocol achieves power savings by selectively choosing short periods of time to suspend communications and shut down the communication device. It manages the important task of queuing data for future delivery during periods of communication suspension, and decides when to restart communication. We also address the tradeoff between reducing power consumption and reducing delay for incoming data. We present results from experiments using our implementation of the protocol. These experiments measure the energy consumption for three simulated communication patterns as well as three trace-based communication patterns and compare the effects of different suspension strategies. Our results show up to 83% savings in the energy consumed by the communication. For a high-end laptop, this can translate to 6--9% sav

TCP has been designed and tuned to perform well under the assumption that all losses are an indication of congestion. When a TCP connection traverses a wireless link, packets may be lost due to wireless transmission errors, in addition to congestion losses. TCP implicitly assumes that all packet losses are due to congestion, and triggers congestion control mechanism when a packet loss is detected. It has been previously demonstrated that this feature of TCP affects performance adversely when packets are lost due to transmission errors. To avoid the performance degradation, techniques to distinguish between corruption and congestion losses without any explicit information from the network (routers or switches) are of interest.

Due to the availability of a wide variety of wireless access technologies, a mobile host can potentially have subscriptions and access to more than one wireless network at a given time. In this paper, we consider such a multi-homed mobile host, and address the problem of achieving bandwidth aggregation by striping data across the multiple interfaces of the mobile host. We show that both link layer striping approaches and application layer techniques that stripe data across multiple TCP sockets do not achieve the optimal bandwidth aggregation due to a variety of factors specific to wireless networks. We propose an end-to-end transport layer approach called pTCP that effectively performs bandwidth aggregation on multi-homed mobile hosts. We show through simulations that pTCP achieves the desired goals under a variety of network conditions.

In modern systems, developers are often unable to modify the underlying operating system. To build services in such an environment, we advocate the use of gray-box techniques. When treating

In this paper, we study the effects of network asymmetry on endto -end TCP performance and suggest techniques to improve it. The networks investigated in this study include a wireless cable modem network and a packet radio network, both of which can form an important part of a mobile ad hoc network. In recent literature (e.g., [18]), asymmetry has been considered in terms of a mismatch in bandwidths in the two directions of a data transfer. We generalize this notion of bandwidth asymmetry to other aspects of asymmetry, such as latency and media-access, and packet error rate, which are common in wide-area wireless networks. Using a combination of experiments on real networks and simulation, we analyze TCP performance in such networks where the throughput achieved is not solely a function of the link and traffic characteristics in the direction of data transfer (the forward direction) , but depends significantly on the reverse direction as well. We focus on bandwidth and latency asymmet...