MobiCom 2010 Poster: TCPSpeaker: Clean and Dirty Sides of the Same Slate

The performance and fairness problems of TCP in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are well known. Approaches to solve them fall roughly into two classes: those which maintain legacy TCP compatibility, and clean-slate protocols which redefine WMN transport, breaking TCP compatibility. Clean-slate approaches such as block-switched and cross-layer transport protocols break the end-to-end principle, using intermediate WMN nodes for intelligent caching and pacing and show significant throughput and flow fairness improvements. Clean-slate approaches however, exclude TCP-speaking clients from the network and as such, their practical impact as well as live-network evaluation potential is severely limited.