| Abstract |
Numerous flavors of TCP are already in existence,
and further variations on TCP mechanisms are frequently being
introduced in order to, for example, cope with the packet loss
characteristics of wireless links. Moreover, the proliferation new
wireless standards and the relative performance differences
among them have been mushrooming in recent years. Given the
increasingly heterogeneous nature of the Internet, mechanisms
do not usually exist for a server to specifically select an
appropriate TCP flavor for each individual download. In this
paper, we therefore present and assess a cross-layer solution for
a node (e.g. a base-station) to rapidly adapt lower layer
characteristics (the coding rate and local ARQ retransmissions
threshold) based on the detected TCP flavor, in order to optimize
the end-to-end performance of the download for that utilized
flavor of TCP. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme has
considerable potential to improve the overall download
throughput, while placing no burden on the server and requiring
no changes to existing TCP flavors. |