4th International IEEE Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, Systems

Research Article

Designing a rate-based transport protocol for wired-wireless networks

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/BROADNETS.2007.4550410,
        author={Shravan Gaonkar and Romit Roy Roy  Choudhury and Luiz Magalhaes and Robin  Kravets},
        title={Designing a rate-based transport protocol for wired-wireless networks},
        proceedings={4th International IEEE Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, Systems},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2008},
        month={6},
        keywords={Communication system control  Degradation  Internet  Performance loss  Probes  Propagation losses  Telecommunication traffic  Transport protocols  Wireless communication  Wireless networks},
        doi={10.1109/BROADNETS.2007.4550410}
    }
    
  • Shravan Gaonkar
    Romit Roy Roy Choudhury
    Luiz Magalhaes
    Robin Kravets
    Year: 2008
    Designing a rate-based transport protocol for wired-wireless networks
    BROADNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/BROADNETS.2007.4550410
Shravan Gaonkar1,*, Romit Roy Roy Choudhury2,*, Luiz Magalhaes3,*, Robin Kravets1,*
  • 1: Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, IL
  • 2: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC
  • 3: Engenharia de Telecomunicaes, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
*Contact email: gaonkar@uiuc.edu, romit@ee.duke.edu, schara@midiacom.uff.br, rhk@uiuc.edu

Abstract

A large majority of the Internet traffic relies on TCP as its transport protocol. In future, as the edge of the Internet continues to extend over the wireless medium, TCP (or its close variants) may not prove to be appropriate. The key reason is in TCP’s inability to discriminate congestion losses from transmission losses. Since transmission losses are frequent in wireless networks, the penalty from loss misclassification can become high, leading to performance degradation. This paper presents an eXtended Rate-based Transport Protocol (XRTP), designed to support communication over lossy wireless media. We depart from the ack-based rate control paradigm. Instead, we try to estimate the network conditions by injecting probe packets at the sender, and then observing the spacing between packets that arrive at the receiver. We show that these observations can be useful indicators of available bandwidth, network congestion, and even the cause of packet loss. The inferences from the observations are utilized to regulate the transmission rate at the sender, leading to desirable properties of congestion control and loss discrimination. Simulation results show the efficacy of our proposed rate-based protocol in lossy wireless environments.