Performance enhancement techniques for TCP over wireless links

In this paper, TCP performance over a multi-hop ad hoc wireless network testbed is evaluated. We propose a method to improve the TCP performance using the Snoop protocol developed for last-hop wireless networks and packet salvaging feature of the well-known dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. Our objective is to improve the TCP performance without changing the protocol itself. To this end, two different modules (i.e., Snoop and packet salvaging modules) are included in the system architecture. These modules are used to hide the wireless link errors from TCP layer and to reduce the number of end-to-end packet retransmissions. The performance of the proposed method is tested over an experimental testbed for two routing protocols (DSR and ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV)) and our results show that TCP performance can be improved by 19%.