Internet of Things

Dr. Atri Mukhopadhyay

Assistant Professor
EEE Department
BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus

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 Transport layer protocols

• The objectives of a transport layer protocol include

– the setting up of an end-to-end connection,
– end-to-end delivery of data packets,
– flow control, and
– congestion control.

• There exist simple, unreliable, and connection-less transport layer

protocols such as UDP, and

• Reliable, byte-stream-based, and connection-oriented transport layer

protocols such as TCP for wired networks.

• These traditional wired transport layer protocols are not suitable for ad
hoc wireless networks due to the inherent problems associated with
the latter.

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 Issues designing Transport layer protocols

• Induced Traffic
– Traffic at any given link (or path) due to the traffic through neighboring links
(or paths) is referred to as induced traffic.

• Induced Throughput Unfairness

– Throughput unfairness at the transport layer due to the throughput/delay
unfairness existing at the lower layers such as the network and MAC layers

• Separation of congestion control, reliability, and flow control

– A transport layer protocol can provide better performance if end-to-end
reliability, flow control, and congestion control are handled separately.
– Reliability and flow control are end-to-end activities, whereas congestion can
at times be a local activity.
– The transport layer flow can experience congestion with just one intermediate
link under congestion. Hence, in networks such as ad hoc wireless networks,
the performance of the transport layer may be improved if these are
separately handled.

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 Issues designing Transport layer protocols

• Power and bandwidth constraints

– Nodes in ad hoc wireless networks face resource constraints including the
two most important resources: (i) power source and (ii) bandwidth.
– The performance of a transport layer protocol is significantly affected by
these constraints.

• Misinterpretation of congestion
– Traditional mechanisms of detecting congestion in networks, such as
packet loss and retransmission timeout, are not suitable for detecting the
network congestion in ad hoc wireless networks.
– This is because the high error rates of wireless channel, location-
dependent.
– Contention, hidden terminal problem, packet collisions in the network,
path breaks due to the mobility of nodes, and node failure due to a
drained battery can also lead to packet loss in ad hoc wireless networks.

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 Issues designing Transport layer protocols

• Completely decoupled transport layer

– Another challenge faced by a transport layer protocol is the
interaction with the lower layers.
– Wired network transport layer protocols are almost completely
decoupled from the lower layers.
– In ad hoc wireless networks, the cross-layer interaction between the
transport layer and lower layers such as the network layer and the
MAC layer is important for the transport layer to adapt to the changing
network environment.

• Dynamic topology
– Some of the deployment scenarios of ad hoc wireless networks
experience rapidly changing network topology due to the mobility of
nodes.
– This can lead to frequent path breaks, partitioning and remerging of
networks, and high delay in reestablishment of paths.

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 Design Goals

• The protocol should maximize the throughput per

connection.
• It should provide throughput fairness across
contending flows.
• The protocol should incur minimum connection setup
and connection maintenance overheads. It should
minimize the resource requirements for setting up and
maintaining the connection in order to make the
protocol scalable in large networks.
• The transport layer protocol should have mechanisms
for congestion control and flow control in the network.

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 Design Goals

• It should be able to provide both reliable and unreliable

connections as per the requirements of the application
layer.
• The protocol should be able to adapt to the dynamics of
the network such as the rapid change in topology and
changes in the nature of wireless links from unidirectional
to bidirectional or vice versa.
• One of the important resources, the available bandwidth,
must be used efficiently.
• The protocol should be aware of resource constraints such
as battery power and buffer sizes and make efficient use of
them.

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 Design Goals

• The transport layer protocol should make use of

information from the lower layers in the protocol
stack for improving the network throughput.
• It should have a well-defined cross-layer
interaction framework for effective, scalable, and
protocol-independent interaction with lower
layers.
• The protocol should maintain end-to-end
semantics.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Misinterpretation of packet loss

– Traditional TCP was designed for wired networks
where the packet loss is mainly attributed to network
congestion.
– Ad hoc wireless networks experience a much higher
packet loss due to factors such as high bit error rate
(BER) in the wireless channel, increased collisions due
to the presence of hidden terminals, presence of
interference, location-dependent contention, uni-
directional links, frequent path breaks due to mobility
of nodes, and the inherent fading properties of the
wireless channel.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Frequent path breaks

– Ad hoc wireless networks experience dynamic changes in
network topology because of the unrestricted mobility of
the nodes in the network.
– If the route reestablishment time is greater than the RTO
period of the TCP sender, then the TCP sender assumes
congestion in the network, retransmits the lost packets,
and initiates the congestion control algorithm.
– Eventually, when a new route is found, the TCP throughput
continues to be low for some time, as it has to build up the
congestion window since the traditional TCP undergoes a
slow start.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Effect of path length

– It is found that the TCP throughput degrades
rapidly with an increase in path length in string
(linear chain) topology ad hoc wireless networks
– The possibility of a path break increases with path
length.
– Given that the probability of a link break is pl, the
probability of a path break (pb) for a path of length
k can be obtained as pb = 1 - (1 - pl)k.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Misinterpretation of congestion window

– TCP considers the congestion window as a measure of
the rate of transmission that is acceptable to the
network and the receiver.
– In ad hoc wireless networks, the congestion control
mechanism is invoked when the network gets
partitioned or when a path break occurs.
– This reduces the congestion window and increases the
RTO period. When the route is reconfigured, the
congestion window may not reflect the transmission
rate acceptable to the new route, as the new route
may actually accept a much higher transmission rate.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Asymmetric link behaviour

– The radio channel used in ad hoc wireless networks
has different properties such as location-dependent
contention, environmental effects on propagation,
and directional properties leading to asymmetric links.
– The directional links can result in delivery of a packet
to a node, but failure in the delivery of the
acknowledgment back to the sender.
– It is possible for a bidirectional link to become uni-
directional for a while.
– This can also lead to TCP invoking the congestion
control algorithm and several retransmissions.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Uni-directional path
– Traditional TCP relies on end-to-end ACK for ensuring reliability. Since
the ACK packet is very short compared to a data segment, ACKs
consume much less bandwidth in wired networks.
– In ad hoc wireless networks, every TCP ACK packet requires RTS-CTS-
Data-ACK exchange in case IEEE 802.11 is used as the underlying MAC
protocol.
– This can lead to an additional overhead of more than 70 bytes if there
are no retransmissions. This can lead to significant bandwidth
consumption on the reverse path, which may or may not contend with
the forward path.
– If the reverse path contends with the forward path, it can lead to the
reduction in the throughput of the forward path.
– A path break on an entirely different reverse path can affect the
performance of the network as much as a path break in the forward
path.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Multipath routing
– There exists a set of QoS routing and best-effort routing
protocols that use multiple paths between a source-
destination pair.
– There are several advantages in using multipath routing.
Some of these advantages include the reduction in route
computing time, the high resilience to path breaks, high
call acceptance ratio, and better security.
– For TCP, these advantages may add to throughput
degradation. These can lead to a significant amount of out-
of-order packets, which in turn generates a set of duplicate
acknowledgments (DUPACKs) which cause additional
power consumption and invocation of congestion control.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Network partitioning and remerging

– The randomly moving nodes in an ad hoc wireless
network can lead to network partitions.
– As long as the TCP sender, the TCP receiver, and all the
intermediate nodes in the path between the TCP
sender and the TCP receiver remain in the same
partition, the TCP connection will remain intact.
– It is likely that the sender and receiver of the TCP
session will remain in different partitions and, in
certain cases, that only the intermediate nodes are
affected by the network partitioning.

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• Network partitioning and remerging

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 Shortcomings of Traditional TCP

• The use of sliding-window-based transmission

– TCP uses a sliding window for flow control.
– The transmission of packets is decided by the size of the
window, and when the ACKs arrive from a destination, further
packets are transmitted.
– This avoids the use of individual fine-grained timers for
transmission of each TCP flow.
– Such a design is preferred in order to improve scalability of the
protocol in high-bandwidth networks such as the Internet where
millions of TCP connections may be established with some
heavily loaded servers.
– The use of a sliding window can also contribute to degraded
performance in bandwidth-constrained ad hoc wireless
networks where the MAC layer protocol may not exhibit short-
term and long-term fairness.

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 Adhoc TCP

• Ad hoc TCP (ATCP) uses a network layer feedback

mechanism to make the TCP sender aware of the
status of the network path over which the TCP packets
are propagated.
• Based on the feedback information received from the
intermediate nodes, the TCP sender changes its state
to the
– persist state,
– congestion control state,
– or the retransmit state.

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 Adhoc TCP

• When an intermediate node finds that the network is partitioned,

then the TCP sender state is changed to the persist state where it
avoids unnecessary retransmissions.
– When ATCP puts TCP in the persist state, it sets TCP’s congestion
window size to one in order to ensure that TCP does not continue
using the old congestion window value.
– This forces TCP to probe the correct value of the congestion window to
be used for the new route.
• If an intermediate node loses a packet due to error, then the ATCP
at the TCP sender immediately retransmits it without invoking the
congestion control algorithm.
– In order to be compatible with widely deployed TCP based networks,
ATCP provides this feature without modifying the traditional TCP.
• ATCP is implemented as a thin layer residing between the IP and
TCP protocols. The ATCP layer essentially makes use of the explicit
congestion notification (ECN) for maintenance of the states.

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 Adhoc TCP

• This does not require changes in the existing TCP

protocol.
• This layer is active only at the TCP sender.
• The major function of the ATCP layer is to monitor the
packets sent and received by the TCP sender, the state
of the TCP sender, and the state of the network.
• The four states in the ATCP are
– (i) NORMAL,
– (ii) CONGESTED,
– (iii) LOSS, and
– (iv) DISCONN.

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 Adhoc TCP

• When a TCP connection is established, the ATCP sender

state is in NORMAL. In this state, ATCP does not interfere
with the operation of TCP and it remains invisible.
• When packets are lost or arrive out-of-order at the
destination, it generates duplicate ACKs.
– In traditional TCP, upon reception of duplicate ACKs, the TCP
sender retransmits the segment under consideration and
shrinks the contention window.
– But the ATCP sender counts the number of duplicate ACKs
received and if it reaches three, instead of forwarding the
duplicate ACKs to TCP, it puts TCP in the persist state and ATCP
in the LOSS state. Hence, the TCP sender avoids invoking
congestion control. In the LOSS state, ATCP retransmits the
unacknowledged segments from the TCP buffer.

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 Adhoc TCP

• When a TCP connection is established, the ATCP sender state is in

NORMAL. In this state, ATCP does not interfere with the operation of TCP
and it remains invisible.
• When packets are lost or arrive out-of-order at the destination, it
generates duplicate ACKs.
– In traditional TCP, upon reception of duplicate ACKs, the TCP sender
retransmits the segment under consideration and shrinks the contention
window.
– But the ATCP sender counts the number of duplicate ACKs received and if it
reaches three, instead of forwarding the duplicate ACKs to TCP, it puts TCP in
the persist state and ATCP in the LOSS state. Hence, the TCP sender avoids
invoking congestion control. In the LOSS state, ATCP retransmits the
unacknowledged segments from the TCP buffer.
– When a new ACK comes from the TCP receiver, it is forwarded to TCP and the
TCP sender is removed from the persist state and then the ATCP sender
changes to the NORMAL state.

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 Adhoc TCP

• When the ATCP sender is in the LOSS state, the receipt

of an ECN message or an ICMP source quench message
changes it to the CONGESTED state.
• Along with this state transition, the ATCP sender
removes the TCP sender from the persist state.
• When the network gets congested, the ECN flag is set
in the data and the ACK packets.
• When the ATCP sender receives this ECN message in
the normal state, it changes to the CONGESTED state
and just remains invisible, permitting TCP to invoke
normal congestion control mechanisms.

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 Adhoc TCP

• When a route failure or a transient network partition occurs in the

network, ATCP expects the network layer to detect these and inform the
ATCP sender through an ICMP destination unreachable (DUR) message.
– Upon reception of the DUR message, ATCP puts the TCP sender into the
persist state and enters into the DISCONN state.
– It remains in the DISCONN state until it is connected and receives any data or
duplicate ACKs. On the occurrence of any of these events, ATCP changes to the
NORMAL state.
• The connected status of the path can be detected by the
acknowledgments for the periodic probe packets generated by the TCP
sender.
• The receipt of an ICMP DUR message in the LOSS state or the CONGESTED
state causes a transition to the DISCONN state.
• When ATCP puts TCP into the persist state, it sets the congestion window
to one segment in order to make TCP probe for the new congestion
window when the new route is available.

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 Adhoc TCP

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 Adhoc TCP
• Two major advantages of ATCP are
• (i) it maintains the end-to-end semantics of TCP and
• (ii) it is compatible with traditional TCP.
• These advantages permit ATCP to work seamlessly with the Internet.
• In addition, ATCP provides a feasible and efficient solution to improve
throughput of TCP in ad hoc wireless networks.

• The disadvantages of ATCP include

• (i) the dependency on the network layer protocol to detect the route
changes and partitions, which not all routing protocols may implement
and
• (ii) the addition of a thin ATCP layer to the TCP/IP protocol stack that
requires changes in the interface functions currently being used.

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