Adaptive end-to-end FEC for improving TCP performance over wireless links

TCP is a reliable transport protocol that has been tuned to perform well in networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. However, wireless networks are different: TCP responds both to congestion-based and error-based losses by invoking a congestion control algorithm and reducing the sending rate, resulting in degraded end-to-end performance for wireless systems. We investigate a new end-to- end approach for improving TCP performance over lossy links by using adaptive, end-to-end forward error correction (FEC) for recovering losses and consequently avoiding the TCP back-off behaviour. Of course there is a clear trade-off between the capacity consumed by FEC and the gain achieved in the overall throughput. An adaptive algorithm is needed to calculate the optimum ratio of redundancy given the state of the connection. The sender uses feedback information from the receiver to dynamically tune the FEC parameters. Through simulations we evaluate the performance of TCP with end-to-end FEC in mixed wired and wireless networks. The simulation results show in different scenarios that the throughput can be significantly improved by adding end-to-end FEC to TCP. However, compared to other improved TCP variants such as Westwood+ the performance is not improved, hence a direct modification of TCP congestion control appears to be more efficient than adding end-to-end FEC.