Tuning the TCP Timeout Mechanism in Wireless Networks to Maximize Throughput Via Stochastic Stopping Time Methods

The authors present an optimization problem that aims to maximize the throughput of a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection between two nodes in a wireless ad-hoc network. More specifically, a persistent TCP connection is established between two nodes that are one hop away in a wireless unslotted Aloha network. The optimization is over the TCP timeout period, i.e. the problem is to find the optimal waiting period before the TCP sender declares a timeout event in the absence of a received acknowledgment for a transmitted packet.