TCP throughput and fairness performance in presence of delay spikes in wireless networks

Wireless networks are likely to experience delay spikes exceeding several times the typical round-trip-time figures, which can cause spurious timeouts that lead to unnecessary retransmissions and reduction of the TCP sender's transmission rate, and thus, the throughput of the TCP is degraded. This paper presents some research results on the effect of delay spikes caused by handover on TCP performance by using three different mobility models. It is shown that the throughput of TCP connection over a single bottleneck link is decreased in the presence of delay spikes significantly. Furthermore, it is shown that the fairness feature of TCP is also severely affected in the presence of delay spikes. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.