Mobile TCP and its Advantages

MOBILE TCP

The M-TCP (mobile TCP)1 approach has the same goals as I-TCP and snooping TCP: to prevent the sender window from shrinking if bit errors or disconnection but not congestion cause current problems. M-TCP wants to improve overall throughput, to lower the delay, to maintain end-to-end semantics of TCP, and to provide a more efficient handover. Additionally, M-TCP is especially adapted to the problems arising from lengthy or frequent disconnections (Brown, 1997). M-TCP splits the TCP connection into two parts as I-TCP does. An unmodified TCP is used on the standard host-supervisory host (SH) connection, while an optimized TCP is used on the SH-MH connection. The supervisory host is responsible for exchanging data between both parts similar to the proxy in ITCP (see Figure 9.1).

The M-TCP approach assumes a relatively low bit error rate on the wireless link. Therefore, it does not perform caching/retransmission of data via the SH. If a packet is lost on the wireless link, it has to be retransmitted by the original sender. This maintains the TCP end-to-end semantics. The SH monitors all packets sent to the MH and ACKs returned from the MH. If the SH does not receive an ACK for some time, it assumes that the MH is disconnected. It then chokes the sender by setting the sender‟s window size to 0. Setting the window size to 0 forces the sender to go into persistent mode, i.e., the state of the sender will not change no matter how long the receiver is disconnected. This means that the sender will not try to retransmit data. As soon as the SH (either the old SH or a new SH) detects connectivity again, it reopens the window of the sender to the old value. The sender can continue sending at full speed. This mechanism does not require changes to the sender‟s TCP. The wireless side uses an adapted TCP that can recover from packet loss much faster. This modified TCP does not use slow start, thus, M-TCP needs a bandwidth manager to implement fair sharing over the wireless link.

The advantages of M-TCP are the following:

● It maintains the TCP end-to-end semantics. The SH does not send any ACK itself but forwards the ACKs from the MH.

0 If the MH is disconnected, it avoids useless retransmissions, slow starts or breaking connections by simply shrinking the sender‘s window to 0.Since it does not buffer data in the SH as I-TCP does, it is not necessary to forward buffers to a new SH. Lost packets will be automatically retransmitted to the new SH.

The lack of buffers and changing TCP on the wireless part also has some disadvantages:

1 As the SH does not act as proxy as in I-TCP, packet loss on the wireless link due to bit errors is propagated to the sender. M-TCP assumes low bit error rates, which is not always a valid

assumption.

2 A modified TCP on the wireless link not only requires modifications to the MH protocol software but also new network elements like the bandwidth manager.