Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A packet-reordering solution to wireless losses in transmission control protocol

  • Published:
Wireless Networks Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The wireless medium may cause substantial packet losses, rendering Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) inefficient. We propose a cross-layer solution by combining link-layer retransmission techniques and a solution for TCP packet reordering. It is costly to conduct link-layer retransmission with the constraint of orderly packet delivery. We require the link layer to provide reliable packet delivery, but without orderly delivery guarantee, thus transforming the problem of high packet error rates to the problem of packet reordering. The latter is dealt with by enhancing TCP with a solution for packet reordering. We justify our design by analyzing both general scenarios and the case of IEEE 802.11n. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in improving TCP connection goodput in wireless networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. A cumulative ACK is an ACK that uses the cumulative ACK field in the TCP header to acknowledge all in-sequence data received by the destination.

  2. After fast retransmit is triggered in TCP Tahoe, ssthresh is set to half of the amount of outstanding data sent to the network. Slow start is then carried out with cwnd set to one SMSS.

  3. In the case that multiple losses occur within a window, only the first loss will be seen by the sender and counted towards p c .

  4. We assume that N a is reasonably upper bounded so as to avoid starvation among competing wireless nodes.

References

  1. Allman, M., Balakrishnan, H., & Floyd, S. (2001, January). Enhancing TCP’s loss recovery using limited transmit. Request for Comments, RFC 3042, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force.

  2. Allman, M., Paxson, V., & Blanton, E. (2009, September). TCP congestion control. Request for Comments, RFC 5681, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force.

  3. Balakrishnan, H., Padmanabhan, V. N., Seshan, S., & Katz, R. H. (1997, December). A comparison of mechanisms for improving TCP performance over wireless links. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 5(6), 756–769.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bhandarkar, S., Sadry, N. E., Reddy, A. L. N., & Vaidya, N. H. (2005, September/October). TCP-DCR: A novel protocol for tolerating wireless channel errors. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 4(5), 517–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bohacek S., Hespanha J.P., Lee J., Lim C., Obraczka K. (2006, April). A new TCP for persistent packet reordering. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 14(2), 369–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Casetti, C., Gerla, M., Mascolo, S., Sanadidi, M. Y., & Wang, R. (2002, September) TCP Westwood: End-to-end congestion control for wired/wireless networks. Wireless Networks, 8(5), 467–479.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Chan, M. C., & Ramjee, R. (2008, April). Improving TCP/IP performance over third-generation wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 7(4).

  8. Chen, M., & Zakhor, A. (2006, March). Flow control over wireless network and application layer implementation. Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2006 (pp. 103–113).

  9. Clark, D. D. (1988, August). The design philosophy of the DARPA internet protocols. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 18(4), 106–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Eckhardt, D. A., & Steenkiste, P. (1999, December). A trace-based evaluation of adaptive error correction for a wireless local area network. Mobile Networks and Applications, 4(4), 273–287.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Fall, K., & Floyd, S. (1996, July). Simulation-based comparisons of Tahoe, Reno, and SACK TCP. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 26(3), 5–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Fall, K., & Varadhan, K. (2011, November). The ns manual (formerly ns notes and documentation). The VINT project.

  13. Floyd, S., Mahdavi, J., Mathis, M., & Podolsky, M. (2000, July). An extension to the selective acknowledgement (SACK) option for TCP. Request for Comments, RFC 2883, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force.

  14. Gharai, L., Perkins, C., & Lehman, T. (2004, October). Packet reordering, high speed networks and transport protocol performance. Proceedings of IEEE ICCCN 2004 (pp. 73–78).

  15. Hu, F., & Sharma, N. K. (2002, December). Enhancing wireless internet performance. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 4, (1), 2–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. IEEE Computer Society (2007, June). IEEE Std 802.11-2007.

  17. IEEE Computer Society (2009, October). IEEE Std 802.11n-2009.

  18. Jacobson, V. (1988, August). Congestion avoidance and control. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 18(4), 314–329.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Karn, P., & Partridge, C. (1991, November). Improving round-trip time estimates in reliable transport protocols. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9(4), 364–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Laor, M., & Gendel, L. (2002, September/October). The effect of packet reordering in a backbone link on application throughput. IEEE Network, 16(5), 28–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Leung, K.-C., Li, V. O. K. (2006, Fourth Quarter). Transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless networks: Issues, approaches, and challenges. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 8(4), 64–79.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  22. Leung, K.-C., Li, V. O. K., & Yang, D. (2007, April). An overview of packet reordering in transmission control protocol (TCP): Problems, solutions, and challenges. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 18(4):522–535.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Li, V. O. K. (1998, April). Personal information service (PIS)—an application of wide-band communications, 2012 A.D. Proceedings of the IEEE, 86(4), 737–740.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Lin, J., Feng, K., Huang, Y., & Wang, L. Novel design and analysis of aggregated ARQ protocols for IEEE 802.11n networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (to appear).

  25. Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., & Romanow, A. (1996, October). TCP selective acknowledgment options. Request for Comments, RFC 2018, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force.

  26. Mellian, M., Meo, M., Muscariello, L., & Rossi, D. (2008, October). Passive analysis of TCP anomalies. Computer Networks, 52(14), 2663–2676.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Padhye J., Firoiu V., Towsley D. F., & Kurose J. F. (2000, April). Modeling TCP Reno performance: A simple model and its empirical validation. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 8(2), 133–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Paxson, V. (1999, June). End-to-end internet packet dynamics. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 7(3), 277–292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Paxson, V., & Allman, M. (2000, November). Computing TCP’s retransmission timer. Request for Comments, RFC 2988, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force.

  30. Postel, J. (1981, September). Transmission control protocol. Request for Comments, RFC 793, Protocol Specification, DARPA Internet Program.

  31. Skordoulis, D., Ni, Q., Chen, H.-H., Stephens, A. P., Liu, C., & Jamalipour, A. (2008, February). IEEE 802.11n MAC frame aggregation mechanisms for next-generation high-throughput WLANs. IEEE Wireless Communications, 15(1).

  32. Third-generation partnership project (3GPP). (2011, July). 3GPP TS 25.322 Version 10.1.0 Release 10.

  33. Wang, F., & Zhang, Y. (2002, June). Improving TCP performance over mobile ad-hoc networks with out-of-order detection and response. Proceedings of ACM MOBIHOC 2002 (pp. 217–225). Lausanne, Switzerland, 9–11 June 2002.

  34. Wei, D. X., Jin, C., Low, S. H., & Hegde, S. (2006, December). FAST TCP: Motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 14(6), 1246–1259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Wu, W., Demar, P., & Crawford, M. (2011, February). Why can some advanced ethernet NICs cause packet reordering. IEEE Communication Letters 15(2), 253–255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Yang, D., Leung, K.-C., & Li, V. O. K. (2007, March). Simulation-based comparisons of solutions for TCP packet reordering in wireless networks. Proceedings of IEEE WCNC 2007 (pp. 3240–3245).

  37. Zhang, M., Karp, B., Floyd, S., & Peterson, L. (2003, November). RR-TCP: A reordering-robust TCP with DSACK. Proceedings of IEEE ICNP 2003 (pp. 95–106).

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research is supported in part by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, under Grant No. HKU 714510E.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China

    Ka-Cheong Leung, Chengdi Lai, Victor O. K. Li & Daiqin Yang

Authors
  1. Ka-Cheong Leung
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chengdi Lai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Victor O. K. Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Daiqin Yang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chengdi Lai.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Leung, KC., Lai, C., Li, V.O.K. et al. A packet-reordering solution to wireless losses in transmission control protocol. Wireless Netw 19, 1577–1593 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0552-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0552-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation