Cross Layer Interaction for improving the performance of TCP in Multihop Wireless Networks

Abstract

The objective of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is to provide reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. Over the past few years, the problem of congestion control has received widespread attention. Many authors have reported that the TCP interacts with the lower layers, but still it cannot predict route failures and network congestion. Their proposals involving the network layer suggest notifying the TCP sender about a routing failure, when the routing layer detects one. The issues discussed above, with the possibility of further avenues for improving the performance of TCP in multihop wireless networks, served as the motivation for this paper. This paper describes the efficient techniques in various layers to improve the performance of TCP over multihop wireless networks. This work analyses the performance of the proposed two types of cross layer flavors, namely the TCP-AL and TCP-WPAL. The cross layer interaction, TCP-WPAL produced better performance than the TCP-AL.