TCP-LoRaD: A Loss Recovery and Differentiation Algorithm for Improving TCP Performance over MANETs in Noisy Channels

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming popular technologies because they offer flexibility in setting up anytime and anywhere, and provide communication support on the go. This communication requires the use of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which is not originally designed for use in MANET environments; therefore, it raises serious performance issues. To overcome the deficiency of the original TCP, several modifications have been proposed and reported in the networking literature. TCP-WELCOME (Wireless Environment, Link losses, and Congestion packet loss ModEls) is one of the better TCP variants suitable for MANETs. However, it has been found that this protocol has problems with packet losses because of network congestion as it adopts the original congestion control mechanism of TCP New Reno. We also found that TCP-WELCOME does not perform well in noisy channel conditions in wireless environments. In this paper, we propose a novel loss recovery and differentiation algorithm (called TCP-LoRaD) to overcome the above-mentioned TCP problems. We validate the performance of TCP-LoRaD through an extensive simulation setup using Riverbed Modeler (formerly OPNET). Results obtained show that the proposed TCP-LoRaD offers up to 20% higher throughput and about 15% lower end-to-end delays than the TCP-WELCOME in a noisy channel under medium to high traffic loads.

Automated summary

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are popular for their flexibility in setting up anytime and anywhere, but using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in these networks raises serious performance issues. In this paper, a novel algorithm called TCP-LoRaD is proposed to overcome the problems of packet losses and poor performance in noisy channel conditions. Simulation results show that TCP-LoRaD offers higher throughput and lower end-to-end delays compared to TCP-WELCOME under medium to high traffic loads.