Performance evaluation of TCP over radio link protocol in TIA/EIA/IS-99 environment

This paper presents the work done to study the effects of the radio link protocol (RLP) layer on the performance of TCP over wireless links. In particular we consider RLP as described in TIA/EIA/IS-99 with variations in some of its parameters. We concentrate on the sensitivity study of TCP throughput and delay, when the parameters of RLP such as segmentation depth and maximum number of retrials varied. Also we consider the effect of maximum TCP advertised window size on the abovementioned TCP performance parameters. Previous work in this area have provided some upper bounds for the performance measures. The results presented are on the basis of detailed simulation of the RLP retransmission mechanism. Network Simulator has been used as the simulation platform for our study. We use a two-state Markov model to capture the mobility characteristics of the channel. Some results for high-speed links are also presented