Improving TCP performance for multihop wireless networks

In this paper, we present a comprehensive performance evaluation of TCP NewReno and TCP Vegas with and without ACK thinning for static multihop wireless IEEE 802.11 networks. Opposed to previous studies, we consider not only IEEE 802.11 operating in ad hoc mode with 2 Mbit/s bandwidth, but also with 5.5 Mbit/s and 11 Mbit/s bandwidths. Simulation results using ns-2 show that TCP Vegas achieves between 15% and 83% more goodput and between 57% and 99% fewer packet retransmissions than TCP NewReno. Considering fairness among multiple TCP flows, we show that using TCP Vegas results in between 21% and 95% fairness improvement compared to TCP NewReno. The reduced amount of packet retransmissions of TCP Vegas also leads to significant savings of energy consumption. The paper gives insight on the particular reasons for such performance advantages of TCP Vegas in comparison to TCP NewReno.