WiTracer: A novel solution to improve TCP performance over Wireless network

Improving TCP performance over Wireless network is critical to enhancing the Quality of Service of mobile users. However, most conventional approaches can neither discover the hidden drawbacks, nor provide both fast and accurate mechanisms to adapt to unique Wireless TCP specifications, thus cannot guarantee desirable performance. In this article, we propose WiTracer, a novel solution for wireless TCP performance enhancement. WiTracer uses several criterion to extract packet losses and Round-Trip-Time (RTT) information, thus to infer potential channel variations. Hereafter, WiTracer builds a simple and robust design to decouple packet loss recovery from TCP congestion control, and mitigates spurious performance degradation. Therefore, satisfactory throughput is maintained, with no modification to existing Reno compatible TCP suite. Extensive simulation and implementation results show that WiTracer outperforms other benchmark approaches and performs well in varying wireless environments.