Performance Enhancement of On-Board Communication Networks Using Outage Prediction

A research area that has become increasingly important in recent years is that of on-board mobile communication, where users on a vehicle are connected to a local network that attaches to the Internet via a mobile router and a wireless link. In this architecture, link disruptions (e.g., due to signal degradation) may have an immediate impact on a potentially large number of connections. We argue that the advance knowledge of public transport routes, and their repetitive nature, allows a certain degree of prediction of impending link disruptions, which can be used to offset their catastrophic impact. Focusing on the transmission control protocol (TCP) and its extension known as Freeze-TCP, we present a detailed analysis of the performance improvement of TCP connections in the presence of disruption prediction. In particular, we propose a Markov model of Freeze-TCP that captures both the TCP behavior and the prediction+"freezing" feature and, using simulations, show that it accurately predicts the performance of the protocol. Our results demonstrate the significant throughput improvement that can be gained by disruption prediction, even with random packet losses or imperfect timing of the predicted disruptions