Improving TCP performance in mobile networks

In this letter, a new transport layer mechanism is proposed to improve the performance of transport control protocol (TCP) in mobile networks. The proposed mechanism is comprised of two parts: a loss classifier (LC) and a congestion window extrapolator (CWE). Based on LC, the cause of packet loss during roaming is determined. If the loss is considered to be caused by congestion in the wireline, the congestion window is halved; otherwise, the packet is considered to be lost in the last hop, the wireless portion, and the sender adjusts the size of the congestion window based on CWE. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. The results show that our mechanism significantly improves TCP performance as compared with existing solutions for mobile networks.