Investigating the Performance of TCP in MANETs

Abstract

The transmission control protocol (TCP) has been widely deployed as transport layer protocol on a multitude of internet works including the internet, for providing reliable end-to-end data delivery. Most of today’s applications such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP and telnet are developed to run on this protocol. The layered approach principle in networking implies that development in mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) can leverage on the experience and solutions developed for TCP in order to achieve rapid and reliable deployment. Hence TCP is naturally viewed as the de facto reliable transport protocol for use in MANETs. As in the internet it is desirable that TCP must provide reliable data transfer services for communication within wireless networks and also between wireless networks and wired internet so that internet can be extended to wireless world. However, assumption made at TCP’s inception reflected characteristics of the prevalent wired infrastructure of networks at the time and subsequently leads to sub-optimal performance when used in wireless ad hoc environments. This paper discusses the simulations done in network simulation NS2 to evaluate performance of TCP in MANETs. The primary objectives of the simulations were to compare TCP throughput in static and mobile nodes; investigate effect of number of hops on TCP goodput; find effect of change in speed of mobile nodes on the TCP throughput.