We study the performance problems that exist when loss responsive flows traverse wireless links, where losses are often unrelated to congestion. We present a novel concept - flow-adaptive wireless links - which provides service differentiation by tailoring link layer error control to the QoS requirements of each flow sharing the link. Flow-adaptive links emphasize local error control as a necessary complement to end-to-end error control, and are independent of transport (or higher) layer protocol semantics. The key idea is that applications use the IP layer as a level of indirection through which QoS requirements are communicated to each link along the path, on a per flow basis. We then demonstrate how this improves performance for the particular class of reliable loss responsive flows. We prove in general that a well engineered, fully reliable wireless link does not interfere with TCP''s end-to-end error recovery. Moreover, we propose a new error recovery algorithm (TCP-Eifel) that can optionally be implemented in TCP to further improve performance. By eliminating the retransmission ambiguity problem the algorithm detects spurious timeouts, and uses these as an implicit cross-layer signal to prevent unnecessary retransmissions in TCP.
Cited By
- Vacirca F, De Vendictis A and Baiocchi A (2006). Optimal Design of Hybrid FEC/ARQ Schemes for TCP over Wireless Links with Rayleigh Fading, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 5:4, (289-302), Online publication date: 1-Apr-2006.
- de Cola T and Marchese M (2006). Study and performance analysis of transport layer mechanisms applied in military radio environment, Computers and Electrical Engineering, 32:1-3, (241-265), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2006.
- Zhou L, Chan P and Radhakrishna Pillai R (2019). Effect of TCP/LLC protocol interaction in GPRS networks, Computer Communications, 25:5, (501-506), Online publication date: 1-Mar-2002.
- Allman M and Paxson V (2019). On estimating end-to-end network path properties, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 31:2 supplement, (124-151), Online publication date: 1-Apr-2001.
- Ludwig R and Sklower K (2019). The Eifel retransmission timer, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 30:3, (17-27), Online publication date: 1-Jul-2000.
- Ludwig R and Katz R (2019). The Eifel algorithm, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 30:1, (30-36), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2000.
- Allman M and Paxson V On estimating end-to-end network path properties Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, (263-274)
- Allman M and Paxson V (2019). On estimating end-to-end network path properties, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 29:4, (263-274), Online publication date: 1-Oct-1999.
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