WiCUBIC: Enhanced CUBIC TCP for mobile devices

CUBIC is widely used as a default TCP variant in android based smart phones and recent Linux kernels. However, since CUBIC is designed to improve the scalability of TCP over fast and long distance networks in wired environments, its throughput performance needs to be improved under erroneous wireless environments. This paper proposes a novel TCP variant, Wireless CUBIC (WiCUBIC), which is an enhanced CUBIC TCP for mobile devices. By considering the different characteristics of packet losses caused by network congestion and wireless channel impairment, WiCUBIC is designed to distinguish losses caused by wireless channel from losses caused by network congestion. With such capability, WiCUBIC shows substantially large throughput performance improvement while providing fairness to other TCP protocols. Simulation results corroborate the efficiency and fairness of WiCUBIC.