Skip to main content
Download PDF
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Busy Tone Assisted Scheme

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking volume 2006, Article number: 051610 (2006) Cite this article

Abstract

It is well known that transmission control protocol (TCP) performance degrades severely in IEEE 802.11-based wireless ad hoc networks. We first identify two critical issues leading to the TCP performance degradation: (1) unreliable broadcast, since broadcast frames are transmitted without the request-to-send and clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) dialog and Data/ACK handshake, so they are vulnerable to the hidden terminal problem; and (2) false link failure which occurs when a node cannot successfully transmit data temporarily due to medium contention. We then propose a scheme to use a narrow-bandwidth, out-of-band busy tone channel to make reservation for broadcast and link error detection frames only. The proposed scheme is simple and power efficient, because only the sender needs to transmit two short messages in the busy tone channel before sending broadcast or link error detection frames in the data channel. Analytical results show that the proposed scheme can dramatically reduce the collision probability of broadcast and link error detection frames. Extensive simulations with different network topologies further demonstrate that the proposed scheme can improve TCP throughput by 23% to 150%, depending on user mobility, and effectively enhance both short-term and long-term fairness among coexisting TCP flows in multihop wireless ad hoc networks.

[1234567891011121314151617]

References

  1. Xu S, Saadawi T: Revealing and solving the TCP instability problem in 802.11 based multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of 54th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC '01), October 2001, Atlantic City, NJ, USA 1: 257-261.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Jiang R, Gupta V, Ravishankar CV: Interactions between TCP and the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Proceedings of DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition (DISCEX '03), April 2003, Washington, DC, USA 1: 273-282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ng PC, Liew SC: Re-routing instability in IEEE 802.11 multi-hop ad-hoc networks. Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN '04), November 2004, Tamba, Fla, USA 602-609.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Xu S, Saadawi T: Revealing TCP unfairness behavior in 802.11 based wireless multi-hop networks. Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC '01), September-October 2001, San Diego, Calif, USA 2: E-83-E-87.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Xu K, Bae S, Lee S, Gerla M: TCP behavior across multihop wireless networks and the wired internet. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Multimedia (WOWMOM '02), September 2002, Atlanta, Ga, USA 41-48.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Wu C, Li VOK: Receiver-initiated busy-tone multiple access in packet radio networks. Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Frontiers in Computer Communications Technology (SIGCOM '87), 1987, Stowe, Vt, USA 336-342.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Haas ZJ, Deng J: Dual busy tone multiple access (DBTMA)—a multiple access control scheme for ad hoc networks. IEEE Transactions on Communications 2002,50(6):975-985. 10.1109/TCOMM.2002.1010617

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Anastasi G, Borgia E, Conti M, Gregori E: Wi-fi in ad hoc mode: a measurement study. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom '04), March 2004, Orlando, Fla, USA 145-154.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Floyd S, Henderson T: The NewReno modification to TCP's fast recovery algorithm. RFC 2582, April 1999

    Google Scholar 

  10. Johnson DB, Maltz DA: Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless networks. In Mobile Computing. Kluwer Academic, Norwell, Mass, USA; 1996:153-181. chapter 5

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Jain RK: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, USA; 1991.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Kuang T, Williamson CL: A bidirectional multi-channel MAC protocol for improving TCP performance on multihop wireless ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM '04), October 2004, Venice, Italy 301-310.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Kanth K, Ansari S, Melikri MH: Performance enhancement of TCP on multihop ad hoc wireless networks. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Personal Wireless Communications (ICPWC '02), December 2002, New Delhi, India 90-94.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Haas ZJ, Deng J, Tabrizi S: Collision-free medium access control scheme for ad-hoc networks. Proceedings of IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM '99), October-November 1999, Atlantic City, NJ, USA 1: 276-280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Gerla M, Tang K, Bagrodia R: TCP performance in wireless multi-hop networks. Proceedings of 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA '99), February 1999, New Orleans, La, USA 41-50.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Chen K, Xue Y, Nahrstedt K: On setting TCP's congestion window limit in mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC '03), May 2003, Anchorage, Alaska, USA 2: 1080-1084.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Fu Z, Luo H, Zerfos P, Lu S, Zhang L, Gerla M: The impact of multihop wireless channel on TCP performance. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing 2005,4(2):209-221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research In Motion (RIM), Ottawa, ON, Canada, K2K 3K2

    Qi He

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P6

    Lin Cai

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, N2L 3G1

    Xuemin Sherman Shen & Pinhan Ho

Authors
  1. Qi He
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lin Cai
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xuemin Sherman Shen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Pinhan Ho
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xuemin Sherman Shen.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

He, Q., Cai, L., Shen, X.S. et al. Improving TCP Performance over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Busy Tone Assisted Scheme. J Wireless Com Network 2006, 051610 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/WCN/2006/51610

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/WCN/2006/51610

Keywords