Title: The Design Principles of TCP-Probing

Abstract

High bit error rates (BER) and mobile-network operations such as handoffs
are the  distinctive characteristics of mobile wireless networks.  TCP is
not designed to deal with such characteristics. Tuned to achieve fairness
and to avoid congestion collapse in wired networks, TCP considers every
packet drop as congestion. However, in wireless networks a packet drop
needs not necessarily to trigger congestion control; TCP needs to be
able to distinguish the "nature" of the error and respond accordingly.
We introduced a new mechanism, called "Probing Device" that allows for
error recovery in response to the nature of the error. We grafted our
"device" into several versions of TCP and we observed significant
improvements in performance.

In this talk I will outline the design principles of TCP-Probing and I
will discuss some representative experimental results.  I will emphasize
on the applicability of probing as an efficient "adaptive error recovery
strategy".

References:
[1] V. Tsaoussidis, H. Badr, "TCP-Probing: Towards an Error Control Schema 
with Energy and Throughput Performance Gains", The 8th IEEE Conference on 
Network Protocols, ICNP 2000, November 2000.
[2] A. Lahanas and V. Tsaoussidis, "Improving TCP Performance over Networks 
with Wireless Components using `Probing Devices'", Technical Report, 
Northeastern University, February 2001.