Unit-3

MOBILE TRANSPORT LAYER

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 Syllabus
• TCP enhancement for wireless protocols
• Traditional TCP
– Congestion control
– Fast retransmit/ fast recovery
– Implications of Mobility
• Classical TCP Improvements
– Indirect TCP
– Snooping TCP
– Timeout freezing
– Selective retransmission
– Transaction oriented TCP
• TCP over 3G Wireless Network

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 Transport Layer

• Provides host to host communication.

• Connection oriented

• Reliability
• Flow control
• Multiplexing

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 introduction

• Supporting mobility only on lower layers upto

the network layer is not enough to provide
mobility support for applications.
• Most applications depend on a transport layer
such as TCP or UDP in the case of internet.

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 • The main difference between UDP and TCP is that TCP
offers connections between two applications.
• Within a connection TCP can give certain guarantees such
as in-order delivery or reliable data transmission using
retransmission techniques.
• TCP has built-in mechanisms to behave in a network
friendly manner. Eg- TCP encounters packet loss, it
assumes network internal congestion and slows down the
transmission rate.
• This is one of the main reason to stay with protocols like
TCP.
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 • One key requirements for new developments
in the internet is “TCP friendliness”.
• UDP requires that applications handle
reliability in-order delivery etc.
• UDP does not behave in a network friendly
manner. i.e does not pull back in case of
congestion and continues to send packets into
an already congested network.
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TCP enhancements for wireless protocol

• Steam oriented, not transaction oriented.

• Network friendly: time out
– Congestion
– Slow down transmission
• Transport protocol typically designed for,
– Typically end system
– Fixed wired networks
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Research activities
• Performance

• Congestion control and efficient

retransmissions
TCP Congestion control
• Packet loss in fixed networks typically due
to overload situations.
• Routers have to discard packets as soon as
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 • TCP recognizes congestion only indirectly via
missing (i.e timed out) acknowledgements.
• Immediate retransmission unwise, they would
only contribute to the congestion and make it
even worse.
• Slow start algorithms used as a reactive action
to reduce the network load.

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TCP Slow Start Algorithm
• Sender calculates/ negotiates a congestion
window threshold for a receiver.
• Start with a congestion window size equal to
one segment.
• Exponential increase of the congestion
window up to the congestion threshold to one
half of the current congestion window.
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• Missing acknowledgement causes the
reduction of the congestion threshold to one
half of the current congestion window.
• Congestion window starts again with one
segment.

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TCP fast retransmit/ fast recovery
• TCP Sends an ack only after receiving a packet.

• If a sender receives several acks for the same packet, this is due
to a gap in received packets at the receiver.
• It indicates that the receiver got all packets up to the gap and is
actually receiving packets, but some are missing (hence gap).
• Sender concludes that packet loss is not due to congestion,
continue with current congestion window (do not use slow-
start), just retransmit all packets from beginning of reported gap.
(go back N).

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 TRADITONAL TCP

• The TCP is one of the core protocols of the

Internet Protocol Suite, often simply referred
to as TCP/IP.
• TCP is reliable, guarantees in-order delivery of
data and incorporates congestion control and
flow control mechanisms.
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• TCP supports many of the Internet’s most
popular application protocols and resulting
applications, including the World Wide Web,
e-mail, File Transfer Protocol and Secure shell.
• In the internet protocol suite, TCP is the
intermediate layer between the internet layer
and application layer.

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The major responsibilities of TCP in an active
session are
• Provide reliable in-order transport of data: to
not allow losses of data.
• Control congestion in the network: to not
allow degradation of the network performance.
• Control a packet flow between the transmitter
and the receiver: to not allow the receiver's
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• TCP uses a number of mechanisms to achieve
high performance and avoid ‘congestion
collapse’, where network performance can fall
by several orders of magnitude.
• These mechanisms control the rate of data
entering the network, keeping the data flow
below a rate that would trigger collapse.

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• There are several mechanisms of TCP that
influence the efficiency of TCP in a mobile
environment.
• Acknowledgments for data sent or lack of
acknowledgments are used by the senders to
implicitly interpret the network conditions
between the TCP sender and receiver.

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 Congestion control
• A transport layer protocol such as TCP has been designed
for fixed networks with fixed end systems.
• Data transmission takes place using network adapters,
fiber optics, copper wires, special hardware for routers
etc.
• Congestion may appear from time to time even in
carefully designed networks.
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• The packet buffers of a router are filled and
the router cannot forward the packets fast
enough because the sum of the input rates of
packets destined for one output link is higher
than the capacity of the output link.
• In this situation router drops the packets.

• A dropped packet is lost for the transmission,

and the receiver notices a gap in the packet
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• Now the receiver does not directly tell the sender which
packet is missing but continues acknowledge all in
sequence packets up to the missing one.
• The sender notices the missing acknowledgement for the
lost packet and assumes a packet loss due to congestion.
• Retransmitting the missing packet and continuing at full
sending rate would now be unwise, at might only
increase the congestion.

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• To mitigate congestion, TCP slows down the
transmission rate dramatically.
• All other TCP connections experiencing the
same congestion do exactly the same so the
congestions is resolved.

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 SLOW START
• TCPs reaction to a missing ack is quite drastic, but it is
necessary to get rid of congestion quickly.
• The behavior TCP shows after the detection of
congestion is called slow start.
• Sender calculates a congestion window for a receiver.

• Start size- one segment

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• The sender sends one packet and waits for
acknowledgement.
• If this ack arrives the sender increases the
congestion window by one, now sending two
packets (congestion window=2).
• This schemes doubles the congestion window
every time acks come back, which takes one
round trip time (RTT).
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• This is called the exponential growth of the congestion
window in the slow start mechanism.
• But doubling the congestion window is too dangerous.
• The exponential growth is stops at the congestion
threshold.
• As soon as the congestion window reaches the
congestion threshold, further increase of the transmission
rate is only linear by adding 1 to the congestion window
each time ack comes back
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• Linear increase continues until a time out at
the sender occurs due to a missing ack, or until
the sender detects a gap in transmitted data
because of continuous acks for the same
packet.
• In either case the sender sets the congestion
threshold to half of the current congestion
window.
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• The congestion window itself is set to one
segment and the sender starts sending a single
segment.
• The exponential growth starts once more up to
the new congestion threshold, then the window
grows in linear function.

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 Fast retransmit/ fast recovery
• The congestion threshold can be reduced because of two
reasons.
• If the sender receives continuous acks for the same packet.
It informs the sender that the receiver has got all the
packets up to the acknowledged packet in the sequence.
• Also the receiver is receiving something continuously
from the sender.

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• The gap in the packet stream is not due to
congestion, but a simple packet loss due to a
transmission error.
• The sender can now retransmit the missing
packet(s) before the time expires.
• This behavior is called fast retransmit.

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• It is an early enhancement for preventing slow start to
trigger on losses not caused by congestion.
• The receipt of acks shows that there is no congestion to
justify a slow start.
• The sender can continue with the current congestion
window.
• The sender performs a fast recovery from the packet loss.

• This mechanism can improve the efficiency of TCP

dramatically.
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• The other reason for activating slow start is a
time out due to a missing ack.
• TCP using fast retransmit/ fast recovery
interprets this congestion in the network and
activates the slow start mechanism.

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Advantages
• It is very simple.

• Minor changes in the MHs software results in performance

increase
• No changes are requires in FA or CH.

Disadvantages
• Insufficient isolation of packet losses.
• It mainly focuses on problems regarding handover.

• It affects the efficiency when a CH transmits already delivered

packets.

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 Implications of mobility
• Slow start mechanism in fixed networks decreases the
efficiency of TCP if used with mobile receivers or
senders.
• Error rates on wireless links are orders of magnitude
higher compared to fixed fiber or copper links.
• This makes compensation for packet loss by TCP quite
difficult.
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• Mobility itself can cause packet loss. There are many
situations where a soft handover from one access point to
another is not possible for a mobile end system.
• Standard TCP reacts with slow start if acks are missing,
which does not help in the case of transmission errors over
wireless links and which not really help during handover.
• This behavior results in a severe performance degradation
of an unchanged TCP if used together with wireless links
or mobile nodes.

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