WTCP: Wireless Transmission Control Protocol

Wireless wide-area networks (WWANs) are characterized by very low and variable bandwidths, very high and variable delays, significant non-congestion related loss, asymmetric uplink and downlink channels, and occasional blackouts. Additionally, the majority of the latency in a WWAN connection is incurred over the wireless link. Under such operating conditions, most contemporary wireless TCP algorithms do not perform very well. We have designed the WTCP protocol, that addresses rate control and reliability over commercial WWANs such as CDPD. WTCP is rate based, uses only end-to-end measurements, performs rate control at the receiver, and uses inter-packet delays as the 4 primary metric for rate control. We have performed experiments with a real CDPD network and simulations in ns-2.

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