| Abstract |
A range of flavors of TCP are already in existence,
and further flavors are 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 quickly
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. 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 implementations. |