APS-FeW: the second order enhancement for TCP over multihop 802.11 networks

TCP is a reliable transport protocol tuned to perform well over traditional wired networks. Although it performs well for wired networks, TCP's implicit assumption that any packet loss is due to congestion is not valid any longer in mobile ad hoe networks. It is observed that TCP induces the over-action of routing protocol and reduces the performance of the connection. Fraction window increment (FeW) scheme for TCP improves the connection performance by limiting TCP's aggressiveness. But to some extent, this limitation is too strict in that it eliminates the possibility to deliver more bytes under the same congestion window. To solve this problem, we propose an adaptive packet size (APS) scheme to work on top of FeW for TCP. The proposed scheme utilizes the advantages of both legacy TCP and FeW to achieve high performance over multihop 802.11 networks. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that APS over FeW outperforms FeW alone by 10 - 25% according to different scenarios, e.g., chain-topology, grid-topology, and random-topology with mobility.