Enhancing MANET's Performance: A Transport Layer Solution

TCP is a reliable transport layer protocol basically designed for wired networks. In TCP, segment loss in transmission is due to congestion in the network rather than due to unreliable medium, the same is not true for Ad-Hoc networks, mainly MANET. MANET, a well known Ad-Hoc network is prone to link failures majorly due to mobility. In MANET, TCP is unable to distinguish between losses because of either route failures or congestion. Sometimes, TCP interprets wireless error as congestion. Aiming at the improvement in TCP over MANET, we focus on TCP New Reno, a widely used TCP variant. Similar to other TCP variant TCP New Reno suffers due to misinterpretation of cause of loss and ultimately degrade throughput. We modify and analyze this TCP variant to improve the transport layer performance over MANET. We know that routing plays an important role in MANET, therefore, we involve DSDV and AODV routing protocol in our study. Along with this, we analyze performance of both actual and modified TCP New Reno implementations in term of Packet Delivery Fraction and Throughput.