Evaluation and optimization of Short TCP completion time over wireless broadband access networks

TCP has always been the most prominent protocol used in internet. More than 90 % of the HTTP session in Internet has less than 20 KB data to send (Comput Commun Rev 40(3):26-33, 2010) and finish the whole transaction in the slow start phase of TCP. These Short TCP transactions face high latency and network underutilization problem in bottleneck last mile wireless broadband connections due to higher Bit Error Rate in wireless when compared with wired connection . In this paper, we evaluate Short TCP by simulating it over wireless broadband networks to bring out the open challenges in optimizing Short TCP's completion time. We also derive mathematical model for estimating and optimizing the completion time of Short TCP connections over broadband wireless networks. We extensively examine our model for Short TCP and propose a generic link level scheduler mechanism with O(1) complexity that uses cross layer information to optimize the completion time of connection. Our result shows that the mathematical model matches the simulation results and we also show that the proposed novel scheduler speeds up Short TCP connection up to 13 % which in turn increases the Quality of Service of the end user without affecting other connections.