Improving TCP Performance Over Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

In multi-hop wireless networks, unlike the wired ones, two main factors affect the TCP performance. First, the maximum throughput is reached for a specific congestion window that is very difficult to detect under dynamically changing network traffic. Second, the excessive control traffic consumes channel bandwidth more severely than in the wired case. The authors' analysis and simulations show that, over high-speed connections, the much shorter ACK-tcp packets consume the channel capacity comparable to the much longer data packets.