Performance of Transport Protocols in Wireless Networks

The increasing popularity of wireless networks indicates that wireless links will play an important role in future inter-networks. Transport protocol as an essential part of the whole protocol hierarchy provides end-to-end communication between two or more communication hosts. In theory, transport protocol should be independent of the technology of the underlying network layer. However, in practice, TCP, as a standard transport protocol for Internet, is tuned for wired network and performs poorly in wireless networks. This paper provides a survey of research on transport protocols for wireless networks. We first summarize the proposals that enhance TCP performance in wireless networks and then provide a classification of transport protocols in ad-hoc networks.