TCP performance over mobile ad hoc networks

La performance de TCP sur des réseaux

mobiles ad hoc
Xiang Chen, Hongqiang Zhai, Jianfeng Wang, and Yuguang Fang

TCP is a transport protocol that guarantees reliable ordered delivery of data packets over wired networks. Although it is well tuned for wired networks,
TCP performs poorly in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This is because TCP’s implicit assumption that any packet loss is due to congestion is
invalid in mobile ad hoc networks where wireless channel errors, link contention, mobility and multipath routing may significantly corrupt or disorder
packet delivery. If TCP misinterprets such losses as congestion and consequently invokes congestion control procedures, it will suffer from performance
degradation and unfairness. To understand TCP behaviour and improve the TCP performance over multi-hop ad hoc networks, considerable research has
been carried out. As the research in this area is still active and many problems are still wide open, an in-depth and timely survey is needed. In this paper,
the challenges imposed on the standard TCP in the wireless ad hoc network environment are first identified. Then some existing solutions are discussed
according to their design philosophy. Finally, some suggestions regarding future research issues are presented.

TCP est un protocole de transfert qui garantit une livraison fiable et ordonnée des paquets de données sur un réseau filaire. Malgré son bon fonctionnement
sur ces réseaux, le TCP performe très mal sur les réseaux mobiles ad hoc (MANETs). C’est dû à ce que la supposition implicite de TCP affirmant
que toute perte de paquet est causée par la congestion est invalide dans les réseaux mobiles ad hoc où des erreurs dans le canal sans fil, le partage du
lien entre plusieurs usagers, ainsi que le routage multi trajet et de mobilité peuvent corrompre de façon significative ou mettre en désordre les paquets
reçus. Si le TCP interprète de telles pertes comme étant de la congestion et qu’il appelle alors des procédures de contrôle de la congestion, il souffrira
d’une dégradation de performance. Afin de comprendre le comportement du TCP et d’améliorer sa performance sur des réseaux multi sauts ad hoc, des
recherches considérables ont été effectuées. Puisque la recherche dans ce domaine est encore très active et que plusieurs problèmes sont encore non
résolus, un aperçu détaillé et opportun est nécessaire. Dans ce papier, les défis imposés au TCP standard dans l’environnement d’un réseau sans fil ad hoc
sont d’abord identifiés. Ensuite, nous discutons de quelques solutions existantes selon leur philosophie de design. Finalement, quelques suggestions sur de
futures questions de recherche sont présentées.

Keywords: congestion control, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), TCP

I. Introduction poor performance if it still interprets such losses as congestions and

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are suitable for applications in
battlefield communications, disaster rescue, and inimical environment
monitoring, where fixed wired infrastructure is unavailable. In most of
these scenarios, reliable data transfer is required. It is well known that
the transport control protocol (TCP) has been well tuned to provide
such services in the traditional wired network environment. Due to
its wide use in the Internet, it is desirable that TCP remain in use to
provide reliable data delivery for communications within MANETs
and for communications across MANETs and the Internet.
In TCP, reliability is achieved by retransmitting lost packets. Thus,
each TCP sender maintains a running average of the estimated round-
trip delay and the mean deviation derived from it. Packets are retrans-
mitted if the sender receives no acknowledgement within a certain
timeout interval (e.g., the sum of smoothed round-trip delay and four
times the mean deviation) or receives duplicate acknowledgements.
Due to the inherent reliability of wired networks, there is an implicit
assumption made by TCP that any loss is due to congestion. To re-
duce congestion, TCP will invoke its congestion control mechanisms
whenever any packet loss is detected.
consequently invokes congestion control and avoidance procedures,
as confirmed through analysis and extensive simulations carried out
in [1]–[6]. Based on these observations, several research works sug-
gest that standard TCP, if no necessary changes are effected, is not
appropriate for use in ad hoc networks [2]–[8].
In response to these MANET-specific challenges, many schemes
have been proposed to improve TCP performance over MANETs.
Based on their design philosophy, they can be classified into three
groups. The first group of schemes incorporates network feedback
information into its designs to modify TCP’s response to non-
congestion-related packet losses, whereas the second group attempts to
operate without requiring explicit feedback. Unlike the previous two,
the third group starts by tuning the lower layers in order for TCP to
operate normally, while leaving TCP intact.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II catego-
rizes the challenges that TCP is faced with in wireless ad hoc network
environments. Some representative approaches to improving TCP per-
formance over wireless ad hoc networks are classified and compared
in Section III. We finally conclude with a discussion of future research
issues in Section IV.

However, MANETs consisting of multi-hop wireless links suffer

from packet losses due to error-prone wireless channels, media access
control (MAC)–layer contention, and route breakages. TCP will yield
 Xiang Chen, Hongqiang Zhai, Jianfeng Wang, and Yuguang Fang are
with Wireless Networks Laboratory (WINET), Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, 446 & 481 Engineer-
ing Building, P.O. Box 116130, Gainesville, Florida 32611, U.S.A. E-mail:
xchen, zhai
@ecel.ufl.edu, jfwang@ufl.edu, fang@ece.ufl.edu
II. Challenges for TCP in MANETs
Unlike wired networks, mobile ad hoc networks have some unique
characteristics that seriously deteriorate TCP performance. These char-
acteristics include unpredictable wireless channels due to fading and
interference, vulnerable shared media access due to random access col-

Can. J. Elect. Comput. Eng., Vol. 29, No. 1/2, January/April 2004
130 CAN. J. ELECT. COMPUT. ENG., VOL. 29, NO. 1/2, JANUARY/APRIL 2004
TCP flow 1 TCP flow 2
0 opportunity for different nodes. As shown in Fig. 1, where the
1 2 3 4 5 6
Figure 1: Node interference in a chain topology.
lision, the hidden terminal problem and the exposed terminal problem,
and frequent route breakages due to node mobility. Undoubtedly, all of
these pose great challenges to TCP in terms of its ability to provide re-
liable end-to-end communications in mobile ad hoc networks. From
the point of view of layered network architecture, these challenges
can be broken down into five categories, i.e., channel error, medium
contention and collision, mobility, multipath routing, and congestion,
whose adverse impacts on TCP are elaborated below in sequence.
A. Channel error
Bursty bit errors may corrupt packets in transmission, leading to the
loss of TCP data packets or acknowledgements (ACKs). If it can-
not receive the ACK within the retransmission timeout (RTO), the
TCP sender immediately reduces its congestion window to one packet,
exponentially backs off its retransmission, and retransmits the lost
packet. Intermittent channel errors may thus cause the congestion win-
dow size at the sender to remain small, prompting low throughput.
B. Medium contention and collision
Contention-based medium access control schemes, such as the IEEE
802.11 MAC protocol [9], have been widely studied and incorporated
into many wireless test beds and simulation packages for wireless
multi-hop ad hoc networks, where the neighbouring nodes contend
for the shared wireless channel before transmitting. There are three
key problems, i.e., the hidden terminal problem, the exposed terminal
problem, and unfairness. A hidden node is one that is within the in-
terfering range of the intended receiver, but outside the sensing range
of the transmitter. The receiver may not correctly receive the intended
packet because of collision from the hidden node. An exposed node
is one that is within the sensing range of the transmitter, but outside
the interfering range of the receiver. Though its transmission does not
interfere with the receiver, it could not start transmission because it
senses a busy medium, which introduces spatial reuse inefficiency. The
binary exponential backoff scheme always favours the latest success-
ful transmitter and results in unfairness. These problems could be more
harmful in multi-hop ad hoc networks than in wireless LAN because
ad hoc networks are characterized by multi-hop connectivity.
MAC protocols have been shown to significantly affect TCP per-
formance [2], [5]–[6], [10]–[12]. When TCP runs over IEEE 802.11
MAC, as [6] pointed out, the instability problem becomes very seri-
ous. It is shown that collisions and the exposed terminal problem are
two major factors that can prevent one node from reaching the other
when the two nodes are in each other’s transmission range. If a node
cannot reach its adjacent node after several tries, it will trigger a route
failure, which in turn will cause the source node to start route discov-
ery. Before a new route is found, no data packet can be sent out. Dur-
ing this process, the TCP sender has to wait and will invoke conges-
tion control algorithms if it observes a timeout. Serious oscillation in
TCP throughput will thus be observed. Moreover, the random backoff
scheme used in the MAC layer exacerbates this behaviour [2]. Since
large data-packet sizes and back-to-back packet transmissions both de-
crease the likelihood that the intermediate node will obtain the chan-
nel, the node has to back off for a random period of time and try again.
After several failed tries, a route failure is reported.
TCP may also encounter serious unfairness problems [2], [6], [10]–
[11] for the following reasons:
Topology causes unfairness because of unequal channel-access
small circle denotes a node’s valid transmission range and the
large circle denotes a node’s interference range, all nodes in a
seven-node chain topology experience different degrees of com-
petition. There are two TCP flows, namely flow 1 from node 0 to
node 1 and flow 2 from node 6 to node 2. The transmission from
node 0 to node 1 experiences interference from three nodes, i.e.,
nodes 1, 2, and 3, while the transmission from node 3 to node
2 experiences interference from five nodes, i.e., nodes 0, 1, 2, 4,
and 5. Flow 1 will obtain much higher throughput than flow 2
because of the unequal channel-access opportunity.
The backoff mechanism in the MAC may lead to unfairness as it
always favours the last successfully transmitting node.
TCP flow length influences unfairness. A longer flow implies
longer round-trip time and higher packet dropping probability,
leading to lower and more fluctuating TCP end-to-end through-
put. Through this chain reaction, unfairness is amplified, as high
throughput will become higher and low throughput will be-
come lower.
C. Mobility
Mobility may induce link breakage and route failure between two
neighbouring nodes, as one mobile node moves out of the other’s trans-
mission range. Link breakage in turn causes packet losses. As stated
earlier, TCP cannot distinguish between packet losses due to route fail-
ures and packet losses due to congestion. Therefore, TCP congestion
control mechanisms react adversely to such losses caused by route
breakages [13]–[15]. Meanwhile, discovering a new route may take a
significantly longer time than the TCP sender’s RTO. If route discov-
ery time is longer than RTO, the TCP sender will invoke congestion
control after timeout. The already-reduced throughput due to losses
will further shrink. It could be even worse when the sender and the
receiver of a TCP connection fall into different network partitions. In
such a case, multiple consecutive RTO timeouts will lead to inactivity
lasting for one or two minutes even if the sender and receiver finally
become reconnected.
Fu et al. conducted simulations considering mobility, channel er-
ror, and shared media-channel contention [4]. They indicated that
mobility-induced network disconnections and reconnections have the
most significant impact on TCP performance compared to channel
error and shared media-channel contention. As mobility increases
compared to a reference TCP, TCP NewReno suffers from a relative
throughput drop ranging from close to % in a static case to
% in
a highly mobile case (when moving speed is  m/s). In contrast, con-
gestion and mild channel error (say %) have a less noticeable effect
on TCP (with a performance drop of less than  % compared with the
reference TCP).
D. Multipath routing
Routes are short-lived due to frequent link breakages. To reduce delay
due to route recomputation, some routing protocols such as the tempo-
rally ordered routing algorithm (TORA) [16] maintain multiple routes
between a sender-receiver pair and use multipath routing to transmit
packets. In such a case, packets coming from different paths may not
arrive at the receiver in order. Being unaware of multipath routing, the
TCP receiver will misinterpret such out-of-order packet arrivals as con-
gestion. The receiver will thus generate duplicate ACKs that cause the
sender to invoke congestion control algorithms like fast retransmission
(upon reception of three duplicate ACKs).
E. Congestion
It is known that TCP is an aggressive transport-layer protocol. Its at-
tempt to fully utilize the network bandwidth can easily cause ad hoc
 CHEN / ZHAI / WANG / FANG: TCP PERFORMANCE OVER MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS
networks to become congested. In addition, because of many factors
such as route change and unpredictable variable MAC delay, the rela-
tionship between congestion window size and the tolerable data rate
for a route is no longer maintained in ad hoc networks. The conges-
tion window size computed for the old route may be too large for the
newly found route, resulting in network congestion if the sender still
transmits at the full rate allowed by the old congestion window size.
Congestion/overload may give rise to buffer overflow and increased
link contention, which degrades TCP performance. As a matter of fact,
[17] showed that the capacity of wireless ad hoc networks decreases as
traffic and/or competing nodes rise.
F. Energy efficiency
As power is limited at mobile nodes, any successful scheme must
be designed to be energy efficient. In some scenarios where battery
recharge is not allowed, energy efficiency is critical for prolonging net-
work lifetime. In [18], the energy-consumption behaviour of three ver-
sions of TCP (Reno, Newreno, and SACK) was compared. The study
in [19] showed that a tradeoff exists between the individual packet
transmission energy and the likelihood of retransmission, which is tied
to the session throughput. Therefore, future study of TCP over ad hoc
networks will need to strike a balance between low energy consump-
tion and high session throughput.
III. Current approaches to improving TCP performance
in MANETs
Recently, several schemes have been proposed to improve TCP per-
formance over mobile ad hoc networks. We classify the schemes into
three groups, based on their fundamental philosophy: TCP with feed-
back [20]–[23], TCP without feedback [14], [24]–[25], and TCP with
lower-layer enhancement [3], [12], [26]–[29]. Through the use of feed-
back information to signal non-congestion-related causes of packet
losses, the feedback approaches help TCP distinguish between true
network congestion and other problems such as channel errors, link
contention, and route failures. On the other end of the solution spec-
trum, TCP-without-feedback approaches make TCP adapt to route
changes without relying on feedback from the network, considering
that feedback mechanisms may bring about additional complexity and
cost in ad hoc networks. The third class of approaches, i.e., TCP with
lower-layer enhancement, starts with the idea that the TCP sender
should be shielded from any problems specific to ad hoc networks,
while lower layers such as the routing layer and the MAC layer need
to be tailored with TCP’s congestion control algorithms in mind. As
expected, this idea guarantees that TCP end-to-end semantics is main-
tained for ad hoc networks to seamlessly internetwork with the wired
Internet. In the following, we present some representative schemes ac-
cording to the aforementioned taxonomy.
Notice that in this paper we focus on how to improve TCP per-
formance over ad hoc networks; therefore some schemes such as the
ad hoc transport protocol (ATP) [7], which attempts to propose an en-
tirely new transport-layer protocol, are not presented here, since they
are not improvement schemes based on standard TCP.
A. TCP with feedback
1. TCP-F
In mobile ad hoc networks, topology may change rapidly due to the
movement of mobile hosts (MHs). The frequent topology changes re-
sult in sudden packet losses and delays. TCP misinterprets such losses
as congestion and invokes congestion control, leading to unneces-
sary retransmission and loss of throughput. To overcome this problem,
TCP-feedback (TCP-F) [20] was proposed so that the sender can dis-
tinguish between route failure and network congestion. In this scheme,
the sender is forced to stop transmission without reducing window size
upon route failure. As soon as the connection is re-established, fast re-
transmission is enabled.
131
RFN From SYN-RECVD
From SYN-SENT
Snooze Established
To FIN-WAIT_1
To CLOSE-WAIT
RRN
or route failure
timeout
Figure 2: The TCP-F state machine [20].
TCP-F relies on the network layer at an intermediate node to detect
the route failure due to the mobility of its downstream neighbour along
the route. A sender can be in an active state or a snooze state. In the
active state, the transport layer is controlled by the normal TCP. As
soon as an intermediate node detects a broken route, it explicitly sends
a route failure notification (RFN) packet to the sender and records this
event. Upon reception of the RFN, the sender goes into the snooze
state, in which the sender completely stops sending further packets
and freezes all of its timers and the values of state variables such as
RTO and congestion window size. Meanwhile, all upstream interme-
diate nodes that receive the RFN invalidate the particular route to avoid
further packet losses. The sender remains in the snooze state until it is
notified of the restoration of the route through a route re-establishment
notification (RRN) packet from an intermediate node. Then it resumes
the transmission from the frozen state. The state machine of TCP-F is
shown in Fig. 2.
2. TCP-ELFN
References [21] and [22] proposed another feedback-based technique,
explicit link failure notification (ELFN). The goal is to inform the TCP
sender of link and route failures so that it can avoid responding to the
failures as if congestion had occurred. ELFN is based on the dynamic
source routing (DSR) [30] protocol. To implement an ELFN message,
the route failure message of DSR is modified to carry a payload simi-
lar to the “host unreachable” Internet control message protocol (ICMP)
message. Upon receiving an ELFN, the TCP sender disables its con-
gestion control mechanisms and enters into a “stand-by” mode, which
is similar to the snooze state of TCP-F mentioned above. Unlike TCP-
F, which uses an explicit notice to signal that a new route has been
found, TCP-ELFN requires the sender, while on stand-by, to period-
ically send a small packet to probe the network to see if a route has
been established. If there is a new route, the sender leaves the stand-by
mode, restores its RTO and continues as normal. Given that most of
the popular routing protocols in ad hoc networks are on-demand and
route discovery/rediscovery is event-driven, it is appropriate to period-
ically send a small packet from the sender to restore routes with mild
overhead and without modification to the routing layer.
Through explicit route failure notification, TCP-EFLN and TCP-F
allow the sender to instantly enter snooze state and avoid unneces-
sary retransmissions and congestion control, both of which waste pre-
cious MH battery power and scarce bandwidth. With explicit route
re-establishment notification from intermediate nodes or active route
probing initiated at the sender, these two schemes enable the sender
to resume fast transmission as soon as possible. However, neither of
these two considers the effects of congestion, out-of-order packets, or
bit errors, all of which are quite common in wireless ad hoc networks.
In addition, both TCP-ELFN and TCP-F use the same parameter sets,
including congestion window size and RTO, after re-establishment of
routes as they do before the route failure; this may cause problems be-
cause congestion window size and RTO are route-specific. Using the
same parameter sets helps little in approximating the available band-
width of the new route if the route changes significantly.
132 CAN. J. ELECT. COMPUT. ENG., VOL. 29, NO. 1/2, JANUARY/APRIL 2004

from routing protocols such as DSR. More precisely, the CWL should
Receive dup ACK or never exceed the RTHC of the path.
packet from receiver
Receive Disconnected
“Destination
Unreachable”
The rationale behind this scheme is very simple, as shown in the
ICMP TCP sender put following. It is known that to fully utilize the capacity of a network, a
CWND 1 in persist state
TCP flow should set its CWL to the bandwidth-delay product (BDP)
of the current path, where a path’s BDP is defined as the product of
TCP the bottleneck bandwidth of the forward path and the packet transmis-
Receive
ECN transmits Normal New sion delay in a round trip. On the other hand, the CWL should never
a packet ACK exceed the path’s BDP in order to avoid network congestion. In ad
hoc networks, if we assume that the size of a data packet is and
ATCP
RTO about the bottleneck bandwidth along the forward and return paths is the
same and equal to

 , it can be easily seen that the delay at any hop
to expire OR retransmits
Congested 3 dup ACKs Loss segments in
TCP’s buffer along the path is less than the delay at the bottleneck link, i.e., 

 .
Since the size of a TCP acknowledgement is normally smaller than that
of the data packet, according to the definition of the BDP, we know
Figure 3: State transition diagram for ATCP at the sender [8]. 

 . Therefore, the CWL, which is bounded by the
path’s BDP, should never exceed the RTHC of the path.

3. ATCP
Ad hoc TCP (ATCP) [8] also utilizes the network-layer feedback. The
idea of this approach is to insert a thin layer called ATCP between IP
and TCP, thus ensuring correct behaviour in the event of route fail-
ures as well as high bit error rate. The TCP sender can be put into
a persist state, a congestion control state or a retransmit state, cor-
responding to the packet losses due to route breakage, true network
This upper bound can be further tightened when the IEEE 802.11
MAC–layer protocol is adopted. In fact, it is shown that, in a chain
topology, a tighter upper bound exists, which is equal to approximately
one fifth of the RTHC of the path. According to this tighter upper
bound, the maximum RTO is set to a relatively small value of  s,
which enables TCP to probe the route quickly should it break (due
to false link failure). Simulation results showed that this simple but
useful strategy is able to improve TCP-Reno performance by % to
congestion or high bit error rate, respectively. Note that unlike the
previous two feedback-based approaches, ATCP also tackles packet
corruption caused by channel errors. The sender can choose an appro-
priate state by learning the network state information through explicit
congestion notification (ECN) messages and ICMP “destination un-
reachable” messages.
The state transition diagram for ATCP at the sender is shown in
Fig. 3. Upon receiving a “destination unreachable” message, the sender
enters into the persist state. The TCP at the sender is frozen, and no
packets are sent until a new route is found, so that the sender does not
invoke congestion control. Upon receipt of an ECN, congestion control
is invoked without waiting for a timeout event. If a packet loss occurs
and the ECN flag is not set, ATCP assumes the loss is due to bit errors
and simply retransmits the lost packet. In the case of multipath rout-
ing, upon receipt of duplicate ACKs, the TCP sender does not invoke
congestion control, realizing that multipath routing shuffles the order
in which packets are received. Thus ATCP works well when multipath
routing is applied.
ATCP is considered to be a more comprehensive approach than
TCP-F and TCP-ELFN in that it accounts for more possible sources of
deficiency, including bit errors and out-of-order delivery due to multi-
path routing. Through recomputation of congestion window size after
each route re-establishment, ATCP may adapt to route changes. An-
other benefit of ATCP is that it is transparent to TCP, and hence nodes
with and without ATCP can interoperate.
In summary, as shown by the simulations, these feedback-based ap-
proaches improve TCP performance significantly while maintaining
TCP’s congestion control behaviour and end-to-end TCP semantics.
However, all these schemes require that the intermediate nodes have
the capability of detecting and reporting network states such as link
breakages and congestion. Enhancementat the transport layer, network
layer, and link layer are all required. Further research on ways to detect
and distinguish network states in the intermediate nodes is needed.
B. TCP without feedback
1. Adaptive congestion window limit setting
Based on the observation that TCP’s congestion control algorithm of-
ten overshoots, leading to network overload and heavy contention at
the MAC layer, Chen et al. [24] proposed an adaptive congestion win-
dow limit (CWL, measured in terms of the number of packets)–setting
strategy to dynamically adjust the TCP’s CWL according to the cur-
rent round-trip hop count (RTHC) of the path, which can be obtained
% in a dynamic MANET.
2. TCP detection of out-of-order and response (TCP-DOOR)
TCP-DOOR [25] attempts to improve TCP performance by detecting
and responding to out-of-order (OOO) packet-delivery events and thus
avoiding invocation of unnecessary congestion control. By definition,
OOO occurs when a packet sent earlier arrives later than a subsequent
packet. In ad hoc networks, OOO may happen multiple times in one
TCP session because of route changes.
In order to detect OOO, ordering information is added to TCP ACKs
and TCP data packets. OOO detection is carried out at both ends: the
sender detects the out-of-order ACK packets, and the receiver detects
the out-of-order data packets. If the receiver detects OOO, it should
notify the sender, given that it is the sender that initiates congestion
control actions. Once the TCP sender knows of an OOO condition, it
may take one of two responsive actions: temporarily disabling conges-
tion control, and instant recovery during congestion avoidance. The
first action means that, whenever an OOO condition is detected, the
TCP sender will keep its state variables, such as RTO and the conges-
tion window size, constant for a time period  . The second action
means that if, during the past time period  , the TCP sender has al-
ready entered the state of congestion avoidance, it should recover im-
mediately to the state prior to such congestion avoidance. The main
reason for this is that the detection of an OOO condition implies that a
route change event has just occurred.
However, OOO can be detected only after a route has recovered
from failures. As a result, TCP-DOOR is less accurate and respon-
sive than a feedback-based approach that is able to determine whether
congestion or route errors occur, and hence can report to the sender
at the very beginning. Furthermore, it may not work well with multi-
path routing since multipath routing may cause OOO as well. There-
fore, it is concluded that TCP-DOOR may work as an alternative to the
feedback-based approach to improve TCP performance over an ad hoc
network, if the latter is not available.
3. Fixed RTO
In TCP congestion control, TCP doubles the RTO and retransmits the
oldest unacknowledged packet when the retransmission timer expires.
Although this exponential backoff mechanism of the RTO could han-
dle network congestion gracefully, it is no longer suitable in MANETs
when the loss of packets or ACKs is caused by temporary route break-
ages, as discussed earlier. In such a case, the RTO should be recalcu-
lated, if possible, according to the new route instead of being doubled.
 CHEN / ZHAI / WANG / FANG: TCP PERFORMANCE OVER MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS
Furthermore, when the new route is established, the TCP sender should
start the transmission immediately instead of waiting for the expiration
of the retransmit timer.
In the fixed RTO approach [14], no feedback from lower layers
is needed. Rather, a heuristic is employed to distinguish route fail-
ures and congestion. When timeouts occur consecutively, i.e., an ACK
is not received before the second RTO expires, the sender assumes
that a route failure rather than network congestion has taken place.
Therefore, the unacknowledged packet is retransmitted again without
doubling of the RTO. The RTO remains fixed until the route is re-
established and the retransmitted packet is acknowledged. By adopt-
ing this strategy, the TCP sender avoids waiting for a long period of
time before attempting to retransmit. This fast retransmission would
force routing protocols, especially those like AODV [31] and DSR,
to repair routes fast, which in turn would lead to a large congestion
window on average and high TCP throughput. Actually, this technique
complements TCP-DOOR.
C. TCP with lower-layer enhancement
1. Routing-layer enhancement
In [26], Anantharaman et al. presented a framework termed Atra to
improve TCP performance over ad hoc networks by enhancing rout-
ing layers. Three mechanisms, called symmetric route pinning (SRP),
route failure prediction (RFP) and proactive route error (PRE), were in-
troduced to minimize the probability of route failures, to predict route
failures in advance, and to minimize the latency in conveying route
failure information to source, respectively. Since an asymmetric path
would increase the probability of route failure for a connection, in the
first mechanism, the ACK path of a TCP connection is always kept
the same as the data path. Based on the progression of signal strengths
of packet receptions from the concerned neighbour, the second mecha-
nism enables the node to predict the occurrence of link failure more ac-
curately. Finally, with PRE, when a link failure is detected, all sources
that have used the link within a certain time period are informed of
the link failure. This reduces the latency involved in the route failure
information delivery and consequently reduces the number of packet
losses, as well as triggering early alternate route computations.
2. Link-layer enhancement
Fu et al. [3] discussed the interaction between TCP and IEEE 802.11
MAC. Their studies reveal two interesting results. First, given a spe-
cific network topology and flow pattern, there exists a TCP window
size, say   , at which TCP throughput is maximized, since the best
spatial reuse can be achieved; further increasing the window size will
reduce throughput. However, the standard TCP protocol does not op-
erate around   ; typically the average window size is much larger
than   . As a result, TCP experiences throughput reduction due to
reduced spatial reuse and increased packet loss. In the simulated sce-
narios, throughput reductions ranging from
% to % of maximum
throughput were observed. Second, most packet drops experienced by
TCP are not due to buffer overflow, but rather to link-layer contention
that is incurred by hidden terminals. Reference [3] showed that con-
tention drops exhibit a load-sensitive loss feature: as the injected TCP
packets exceed   and further increase, the link dropping probability
becomes non-negligible and increases accordingly; after the injected
TCP packets exceed another threshold  , the link dropping probabil-
ity saturates and flattens out. It turns out that the link-layer dropping
probability is not significant enough to make the average TCP window
oscillate around   ; this circumstance subsequently leads to subopti-
mal TCP throughput.
Therefore, two link-layer techniques were proposed in [3] to im-
prove TCP efficiency: a link random early detection (Link-RED) al-
gorithm to tune the wireless link’s packet dropping probability, and an
adaptive link-layer pacing scheme to reduce the medium contention.
The Link-RED algorithm attempts to maintain the optimum conges-
tion window size at the TCP sender. At the link layer each node mea-
sures the average number of retries for recent packet transmissions.
Normally, when the TCP sender increases the congestion window size
and injects more packets into the network, this average number will in-
crease, as more packets will aggravate medium contention. The head-
133
of-line packet is dropped from the buffer or marked as congested with
a probability that is calculated based on this average number. Once
it detects packet losses or the congestion flag in the ACKs, the TCP
sender invokes the congestion control algorithm that could help main-
tain the congestion window size around the optimum value and hence
improve TCP’s throughput.
The goal of adaptive link-layer pacing is to alleviate the medium
contention, especially when the congestion window size exceeds the
optimum value. It is enabled from within the Link-RED algorithm.
When a node (which is just sending a packet) notices that its aver-
age number of retries is below a predefined threshold, it calculates its
backoff time as usual. Otherwise, it increases the backoff period by an
interval equal to the transmission time of the previous data packet, and
backs off accordingly.
3. Neighbourhood RED
As described in the previous subsection on challenges, TCP exhibits
serious unfairness in ad hoc networks as a result of the combination of
MAC-inherent problems such as medium contention, the hidden ter-
minal problem, and the exposed terminal problem. As these problems
are likely to exist in nodes which are located in a neighbourhood, Xu et
al. [27] proposed a scheme named neighbourhood random early detec-
tion (NRED) that seeks to improve TCP fairness from the point of view
of a neighbourhood. By definition, a node’s neighbourhood consists of
the node itself and the nodes which can interfere with this node’s sig-
nal. To make things simpler, a node’s neighbourhood as considered
in the scheme comprises the node itself and its one-hop and two-hop
neighbours.
The key idea of NRED is that each node forms a distributed neigh-
bourhood queue based on the individual queues maintained at every
node located in the node’s neighbourhood, and the RED scheme can
be applied to the distributed queue to address the fairness issue, as has
been done effectively in wired networks to improve fairness among
TCP flows by controlling average queue size at routers.
The NRED scheme boils down to three algorithms, namely, neigh-
bourhood congestion detection (NCD), neighbourhood congestion no-
tification (NCN), and distributed neighbourhood packet drop (DNCP).
Instead of counting on each node to actively advertise its own queue
size information and then measuring the neighbourhood queue size (a
task which may cause a large amount of overhead or even aggravate
congestion), NCD intelligently gets around the difficult task by mon-
itoring channel utilization. Normally, channel utilization can serve as
an indicator of the queue size, based on the observation that channel
utilization around a node is likely to increase when the queues at its
neighbouring nodes build up. An early congestion is assumed to take
place as the channel utilization exceeds a certain threshold. If conges-
tion is detected, the node will calculate the packet dropping probability
and send it in an NCN packet to its neighbours, provided that certain
conditions are met in order to avoid “overreaction.” The neighbours,
upon the reception of such notification, will drop some packets ac-
cording to DNCP.
Simulation studies show that the NRED scheme can improve TCP
fairness to some extent in ad hoc networks. However, the price paid is
that the aggregate throughput in the network is actually reduced, which
shows that there is room for further improvement.
It is noteworthy that, besides the schemes described above, there
are also some other IEEE 802.11 MAC–based TCP enhancement
schemes, such as DCF+ [12], AEDCF [28], and the non-work-
conserving scheduling algorithm [29]. By modifying the MAC pro-
tocol, these schemes are shown to improve TCP throughput or fairness
to some degree.
IV. Conclusions and future research
In this paper, we presented a brief survey of the challenges TCP has en-
countered in MANETs and recent efforts to improve its performance.
134 CAN. J. ELECT. COMPUT. ENG., VOL. 29, NO. 1/2, JANUARY/APRIL 2004
Because of certain inherent characteristics of MANETs, including
time-varying wireless channels, medium collision, and mobility, tradi-
tional TCP, which performs well in fixed wired networks, suffers from
severe performance degradation in wireless networks.
Because the assumption made by TCP that any packet loss is due
to network congestion is not valid in ad hoc networks, either TCP
should be capable of distinguishing various reasons for packet losses,
or such non-congestion-related losses should be reduced. To enable
TCP to identify various causes of packet losses, there are largely two
approaches, depending on whether or not network feedback informa-
tion is used. Feedback-based schemes seem to be able to react more
quickly to non-congestion-related packet losses, and thus to be more
effective in enhancing TCP performance. However, the price to be paid
is that they are more difficult to implement, since they require end
nodes and intermediate nodes to cooperate with each other. On the
other hand, approaches without feedback are relatively simple to im-
plement. However, the performance gain may not be high enough.
Meanwhile, some solutions based on enhancing the link layer and
routing layer provide insights into how to reduce non-congestion-
related losses in order to improve TCP’s performance. At the routing
layer, in an effort to help TCP avoid unnecessary congestion control,
some schemes have been proposed to reduce the negative impact of
mobility by minimizing the probability of route failures and the la-
tency in routing re-establishment. At the link layer, there are a few
algorithms attempting to reduce the contention at the MAC layer and
achieve less packet loss due to medium contention.
Although some encouraging improvements have been reported by
employing the proposed schemes, none of them work well in all sce-
narios and meet all the challenges mentioned. Therefore, there is still
much work to do in the near future. To serve as guidance for future
research, some critical issues regarding improving TCP performance
and fairness are identified as follows.
A. TCP fairness
In light of the considerable effort made to improve TCP end-to-end
throughput, fairness is a critical issue that definitely deserves more at-
tention. It has been shown that in a mobile network with multiple flows,
the throughput can be significantly different among competing flows.
This variance is particularly evident when comparing flows of short
paths to those of long paths. It is crucial for every flow to fairly share
the network resource in ad hoc networks, as the network capacity is
so limited compared with its counterpart in wired networks. Although
fairness is touched upon in a few existing schemes, a more mature ap-
proach is highly anticipated.
B. Compatibility with the wired Internet
For the purpose of internetworking with the wired Internet, as will be
required in future pervasive mobile computing, whatever TCP is de-
signed for ad hoc networks should be fully compatible with the Inter-
net. This quest for compatibility translates into two requirements for
future research. First, TCP’s end-to-end semantics must be maintained.
Second, TCP performance should be considered when TCP connec-
tions span both the wired networks and mobile ad hoc networks.
C. Cross-layer solution
Although layered network architecture brings a myriad of advantages,
the layered design approach is inefficient for wireless networks be-
cause there is a strong interconnection between layers in wireless net-
works. Cross-layer design, where higher layers share the physical- and
MAC-layer knowledge of the wireless medium, thus becomes promis-
ing for more efficient network resource utilization and better quality-
of-service provisioning [32]. To completely tackle TCP performance
degradation over ad hoc networks, we believe the cross-layer approach
is worth exploring, as is evident since the causes for performance
degradation lie in the physical layer, the MAC layer, and the rout-
ing layer.
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