A survey of TCP in wired-cum-wireless environments

The Internet has evolved the last decade, reaching a larger number of users, and encompassing several new technologies. New classes of hosts such as mobile devices are gaining popularity, while the transmission media become more heterogeneous. Wireless networks exhibit different characteristics than wired ones. Mobile hosts have different needs and limitations than desktop computers. TCP has served well the wired Internet for almost 20 years but is not ready for wired-cum-wireless environments. In this paper we present the challenges that have to be met in order to provide reliable transport services to all hosts regardless of the type of network connectivity used. We survey the recently proposed solutions and evaluate them with respect to a wired-cumwireless environment. 1 A wired-cum-wireless Internet