Low delay marking for TCP in wireless ad hoc networks

End-hosts on wireless ad hoc networks typically use TCP as their transport layer protocol. Being designed for wired networks, TCP can perform poorly over wireless networks. Research that has proposed ways to improve TCP performance over wireless networks has concentrated primarily on improving TCP throughput. However, emerging applications, such as interactive multimedia and network games, require reduced delay at least as much as increased throughput. This paper presents LDM¹, an IP layer queue marking mechanism that uses estimates of the number of hops and flows at each wireless node to approximate the optimal marking probability. Analysis of NS-2 simulation results indicates that LDM greatly reduces the round-trip time of TCP connections while improving throughput under many configurations.