Cross-layer Design for Fast TCP ACK-Clocking over WiMedia UWB Networks

The WiMedia UWB technology is a viable solution to enable high-throughput multimedia delivery in future wireless multimedia home networks. However, due to the delay of TCP ACK-clocking, the throughput of TCP connections can be severely degraded and the quality that home users may experience could be substandard. To solve this problem, we propose a cross-layer Fast TCP ACK- Clocking (FTAC) scheme, where a normal MAC ACK conveys a TCP ACK in both contention-based and reservation-based MAC protocols. With FT AC, it is shown by simulation that the utilization of UWB link by TCP is greatly enhanced and the TCP throughput approaches to that of UDP, which could be the upper bound of the utilization of UWB links by higher layers.