TCP Optimization through FEC, ARQ, and Transmission Power Tradeoffs

Abstract

TCP performance degrades when end-to-end connections extend over wireless connections — links which are characterized by high bit error rate and intermittent connectivity. Such link characteristics can significantly degrade TCP performance as the TCP sender assumes wireless losses to be congestion losses resulting in unnecessary congestion control actions. Link errors can be reduced by increasing transmission power, code redundancy (FEC) or number of retransmissions (ARQ). But increasing power costs resources, increasing code redundancy reduces available channel bandwidth and increasing persistency increases end-to-end delay. The paper proposes a TCP optimization through proper tuning of power management, FEC and ARQ in wireless environments (WLAN and WWAN). In particular, we conduct analytical and numerical analysis taking into account the three aforementioned factors, and evaluate TCP (and “wireless-aware” TCP) performance under different settings. Our results show that increasing power, redundancy and/or retransmission levels always improves TCP performance by reducing link-layer losses. However, such improvements are often associated with cost and arbitrary improvement cannot be realized without paying a lot in return. It is therefore important to consider some kind of net utility function that should be optimized, thus maximizing throughput at the least possible cost.

This work was supported in part by NSF grants ANI-0095988, ANI-9986397, EIA-0202067 and ITR ANI-0205294, and by grants from Sprint Labs and Motorola Labs.