TCP NJ+: Packet Loss Differentiated Transmission Mechanism Robust to High BER Environments

Transmission mechanisms that include an available bandwidth estimation algorithm and a packet loss differentiation scheme, in general, exhibit higher TCP performance in wireless networks. TCP New Jersey, known as the best existing scheme in terms of goodput, improves wireless TCP performance using the available bandwidth estimation at the sender and the congestion warning at intermediate routers. Although TCP New Jersey achieves 17% and 85% improvements in goodput over TCP Westwood and TCP Reno, respectively, we further improve TCP New Jersey by exploring improved available bandwidth estimation, retransmission timeout, and recovery mechanisms. Hence, we propose TCP New Jersey PLUS (shortly TCP NJ+), showing that under 5% packet loss rate, a characteristic of high bit-error-rate wireless network, it outperforms other TCP variants by 19% to 104% in terms of goodput even when the network is in bi-directional congestion.