JTCP: jitter-based TCP for heterogeneous wireless networks

Transmission control protocol (TCP), a widely used transport protocol performs well over the traditional network which is constructed by purely wired links. As wireless access networks are growing rapidly, the wired/wireless mixed internetwork, a heterogeneous environment will get wide deployment in the next-generation ALL-IP wireless networks. TCP which detects the losses as congestion events could not suit the heterogeneous network in which the losses will be introduced by higher bit-error rates or handoffs. There exist some unsolved challenges for applying TCP over wireless links. End-to-end congestion control and fairness issues are two significant factors. To satisfy these two criteria, we propose a jitter-based scheme to adapt sending rates to the packet losses and jitter ratios. The experiment results show that our jitter-based TCP (JTCP) conducts good performance over the heterogeneous network.