A New Approach to Local Route Recovery for Multihop TCP in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

The TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a critical component in an ad hoc wireless network because of its pervasive usage in various important applications. However, TCP’s congestion control mechanism is notoriously ineffective in dealing with time-varying channel errors even for a single wireless link. Indeed, the adverse effects of the inefficient usage of wireless bandwidth due to the large TCP timers are more profound in a multihop communication session. In this paper, we design and evaluate local recovery (LR) approaches for maintaining smooth operations of a multihop TCP session in an ad hoc network. Based on our NS-2 simulation results, we find that using the proposed LR approaches is better than using various well-known ad hoc routing algorithms which construct completely new routes.