Support of TCP in wireless mesh with unstable packet forwarding capacity

Opportunistic forwarding and network coding utilize the broadcasting nature of wireless transmission and fluctuation of link quality for enhanced performance in multi-hop wireless networks. However, TCP is not well supported because of the way they operate. The frequent occurrences of dropped packets and out-of-order arrival of them in opportunistic forwarding and decoding delay in network coding overthrow TCP´s congestion control. We propose a mechanism, dubbed TCPFender, for TCP to function over the network layer that uses opportunistic data forwarding and network coding, to properly conduct congestion control in TCP and provide reliable data transport. Our experiment shows that TCPFender achieves significantly higher throughput compared to TCP over IP in a simulated wireless mesh.