AN OVERVIEW OF MECHANISMS FOR IMPROVING TCP PERFORMANCE OVER WIRELESS MOBILE NETWORKS

In the Internet, TCP is the dominating transport protocol tuned to perform well in traditional networks where congestion is the primary cause of packet loss. However, wireless networks also suffer from significant losses due to bit errors and mobile handoffs. TCP responds to all losses by invoking congestion control and avoidance algorithms, resulting in the degraded end-to-end performance unnecessarily. Firstly the recent development of wireless mobile networks and the problems with TCP are introduced. Then the survey and evaluation of mechanisms proposed to enhance TCP performance in wireless networks are presented. Finally, based on the tendency of wireless mobile telecommunication systems, the current problems and the challenges of future research are discussed and analyzed.