The effect of correlated errors on the performance of TCP

Wireless channels are known to introduce correlated bursts of errors at the physical layer. Although these errors affect the performance at all layers of a protocol stack, their precise impact, especially at the higher layers, is not completely understood. We study the effect of error correlations on the throughput of a single transport control protocol (TCP) Tahoe connection. We find that TCP Tahoe performs better in the presence of clustered errors. This suggests that techniques that reduce channel memory may be undesirable.