TCP and other transport protocols over X

This list is an arbitrary and incomplete set of pointers to papers about TCP performance over various link technologies.

IETF Documents:

The Performance Implications of Link Characteristics (PILC) working group.
E.g., RFC 3481: TCP over Second (2.5G) and Third (3G) Generation Wireless Networks.
The concluded TCP Over Satellite working group.
The Transport Area Working Group (tsvwg) includes documents about ECN, Limited Transmit, and a number of proposed modifications to TCP.
TCP over Long Thin Networks: G. Montenegro, S. Dawkins, M. Kojo, V. Magret, and N. Vaidya, Long Thin Networks, RFC 2757, January 2000.
"In view of the unpredictable and problematic nature of long thin networks (for example, wireless WANs), arriving at an optimized transport is a daunting task."

TCP over 2.5G Technologies (GPRS):

Rajiv Chakravorty et al., Flow Aggregation for Enhanced TCP over Wide-Area Wireless, Infocom 2003.
"We examine the performance of TCP and HTTP over GPRS, and show how certain network characteristics interact badly with TCP to yield problems such as: link under-utilization for short-lived flows, excess queueing for long-lived flows, ACK compression, poor loss recovery, and gross unfairness between competing flows. We present the design and implementation of a transparent TCP proxy that mitigates many of these problems."
Rajiv Chakravorty, Joel Cartwright, Ian Pratt, Practical Experience with TCP over GPRS, in IEEE GLOBECOM 2002.
"We show that packet Round Trip Times are large (>1000ms) and can be highly variable, packet losses are relatively rare, and that available bandwidth can be quite variable. These network characteristics do not interact well with current TCP implementations... Beyond the point of full bandwidth utilization, TCP continues to expand the window needlessly, resulting in excessive queueing at the GPRS router. This leads to greatly inflated RTTs (10's of seconds)... We show how a simple transparent proxy interposed between the fixed and GPRS networks can be used to significantly improve TCP connection performance."
J. Korhonen, O. Aalto, A. Gurtov, H. Laamanen, Measured Performance of GSM HSCSD and GPRS, In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications, June 2001.
"The throughput and response time varied a lot when connections were used in motion. One of the reasons is that TCP was not capable to adapt itself properly to the variability of QoS of HSCSD and GPRS, and therefore, it did a lot of unnecessary retransmissions causing performance slowdown."
D. Beaufort, L. Fay, C. Samson, and A. Teil, Measured Performance of TCP Friendly Rate Control Protocol over a 2.5G Network, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Fall 2002.
"We have experimented the current version of TFRC over 2.5G access networks connected to the Internet. These experiments reveal that TFRC behavior is altered, mainly due to large RTT values and low-bandwidth encountered with such heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. We finally suggest an adaptation of the TFRC version proposed in [3] to improve its performance over GPRS."

TCP over 3G Technologies (UMTS, CDMA2000):

Jual Alcaraz et al., Optimizing TCP and RLC Interction in the UMTS Ratio Access Network, IEEE Network, March/April 2006.
"This article describes the most relevant issues concerning TCP-RLC interaction and evaluates the most practical enhancement approaches."
Mun Choon Chan and Ramachandran Ramjee, TCP/IP Performance over 3G Wireless Links with Rate and Delay Variation, Mobicom 2002.
"3G wireless link designers have augmented their system with extensive local retransmission mechanisms. In addition... intelligent channel state based scheduling has also been introduced. While these mechanisms have reduced the impact of losses on TCP throughput and improved the channel utilization, these gains have come at the expense of increased delay and rate variability... We ... proposed a network-based solution called ACK Regulator that mitigates the effect of variable rate and/or delay without significantly increasing the round trip time."

TCP over Satellite:

Satellite Networking in the NS Simulator. Chapter 17 in the NS Manual. Or the PS and PDF forms of the manual.
Henderson, T.R. and R.H. Katz, Network Simulation for LEO Satellite Networks, 18th AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (ICSSC), Oakland, CA, April 10-14, 2000. (also in pdf format)
Henderson, T.R. and R.H. Katz, Transport Protocols for Internet-Compatible Satellite Networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 345-359, February 1999. Abstract.
Henderson, T.R. and R.H. Katz, TCP Performance over Satellite Channels, UCB Computer Science Technical Report 99-1083, December 1999.
Mark Allman, Dan Glover, Luis Sanchez. Enhancing TCP Over Satellite Channels using Standard Mechanisms, January 1999. RFC 2488.
Mark Allman, Spencer Dawkins, Dan Glover, Jim Griner, Diepchi Tran, Tom Henderson, John Heidemann, Joe Touch, Hans Kruse, Shawn Ostermann, Keith Scott, Jeff Semke. Ongoing TCP Research Related to Satellites, February 2000. RFC 2760.
TCP Performance Over Satellite Links. Mark Allman, Chris Hayes, Hans Kruse, and Shawn Ostermann.
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Telecommunication Systems, March 1997.
TCP Performance Over Satellite Links, Craig Partridge and Tim Shepard, IEEE Network, 11(5), September/October 1997.
The concluded TCP Over Satellite working group.
The Research using Ns web page has pointers to additional papers on TCP over satellite links.

TCP over LANs (e.g., Ethernet):

TCP over WLANs (e.g., 802.11):

Chi Ho Ng, Jack Chow, and Ljiljana Trajkovic, Performance Evaluation of TCP over WLAN 802.11 with the Snoop Performance Enhancing Proxy, 2002.
"We study the effect of the Snoop protocol on the performance of TCP over wireless links."
Performance of Reliable Transport Protocol over IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN: Analysis and Enhancement, Haitao Wu, Yong Peng, Keping Long, Shiduan Cheng, and Jian Ma, 2002.
"When TCP runs over WLAN, ... the forward TCP data and the backward TCP ACK will compete for the channel, which may cause collisions and degrade the overall performance."
"Due to increased collision probability, the performance of TCP over WLAN degrades when the number of stations increases."
Saar Pilosof, Ramachandran Ramjee, Danny Raz, Yuval Shavitt, Prasun Sinha, Understanding TCP fairness over Wireless LAN, 2003.
"This paper is the first to focus on TCP fairness in 802.11 networks in the presence of both mobile senders and receivers."
Upkar Varshney, The Status and Future of 802-11-Based WLANs, IEEE Computer, June 2003. (This requires a subscription.)
This paper is not about TCP over 802-11-Based WLANs, but is a survey article on the general status of 802-11-Based WLANs.

TCP over ATM:

Early Packet Discard
A search in google for "TCP over ATM" yields a number of citations.

Transport Protocols over Sensor Nets:

Chonggang Wang et al., A Survey of Transport Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Network, May 2006.
"We ... describe ... challenges of transport protocols, including energy-efficiency, quality of service, reliability, and congestion control."

Changes to TCP, in various stages of progress:

Other:

Research on modeling wireless links for evaluating performance of transport protocols.
This web page by Andrei Gurtov has many more citations.
Research - TCP/IP over Air Links.
This web page from PAN Jianping has a great set of pointers to the literature up to 2001.

Return to [Sally Floyd].
Thanks to Jon Crowcroft and Andrei Gurtov for citations to add to this page.
Content last modified: July 2008. Links updated: October 2008.