TCP over Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Network

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was designed to provide reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. Traditionally TCP was designed and optimized only for wired networks. Ignoring the properties of wireless Networks, TCP can be implemented with poor performance. In order to adapt TCP to wireless environment, improvements have been proposed in the literature to help TCP to differentiate between the different types of losses. Indeed, in wireless networks losses are not always due to network congestion, as it is mostly the case in wired networks. Here we present an overview of this issue and a detailed discussion of the major factors involved. In addition, we survey the main proposals which aim at increasing the TCP performance in the wireless environments.