Performance Evaluation of TCP Throughput on Wireless Cellular Networks

We propose an analytical method for evaluating the TCP throughput performance in a wireless cellular network environment, where the slotted ALOHA protocol is adopted as a data link layer. By using our method, we show that improving throughput at the data link layer level does not necessarily lead to the TCP throughput improvement. Furthermore, we evaluate TCP throughput by considering transmission errors on the radio link. It is shown that when we introduce FEC as an error correcting method, we show that TCP throughput can be improved by selecting an appropriate error correction code with careful consideration on the overhead and the error correction capability according to the quality of the wireless channel.