An energy-efficient TCP quick timeout scheme for wireless LANs

Energy efficiency is critical to wireless network terminal devices, since they are powered by battery in many cases. Our approach to improving energy efficiency is to reduce the idle energy consumption by increasing the amount of information data transmitted by the wireless network interface card for a given amount of energy. We propose a simple TCP quick timeout mechanism (TCP-QT) for the improvement of energy efficiency. Using feedback from the MAC layer, the TCP layer can be made aware of the transmission history of a packet in the MAC layer If a packet has been dropped by the MAC layer, a quick timeout in the TCP layer is triggered, resulting in a fast retransmission of the packet. Thus, the average energy efficiency observed in the application layer is improved, while the current TCP semantics are largely unchanged. Simulation results show that the TCP-QT mechanism can improve the energy efficiency by up to 5 times.