Computer Networks Group - TCPNP - TCP/IP Wireless Networ... (in Projects)

TCPNP - TCP/IP Wireless Network Performance Enhancements

Staff: Xiaoming Fu, Fang-Chun Kuo, Nikunj Modi, Lei Shi, Swen Weiland

In this project we explore the potential of utilizing cross-layer interactions and hardware-software co-design to optimize the end-to-end TCP performance. Scalability and fairness, in addition to security and mobility support, will be a focus of the project.

We propose to extend TCP in the following way (but not limited to):
- introduce a TCP proxy function in the access router
- make the proxy be aware of link layer and network layer situation
- readapt the end-to-end congestion control and reliability
- further improve performance and fairness using aggregated congestion control
- establish and maintain the trust relationship between the end hosts and the proxy
- utilize a hardware-software co-design in the proxy implementation
This way, while the TCP connection split point (i.e., the proxy) introduces some processing overhead, the overall performance and scalability will be improved. The project will evaluate these extensions through both simulations and experiments on a prototype implementation. Furthermore, the impacts to the Internet end-to-end principle and congestion control algorithms will be studied.

Links:

The UC Berkeley BARWAN project / Randy Katz et al.
Dr. Sally Floyd at ICSI maintains a number of pointers to various issues with TCP
A nice collection of TCP congestion control by Prof. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman at RPI
A collection of network performance papers (including TCP performance) by Dr. Tom Dunigan at Oak Ridge National Lab
Papers collection on security issues in wireless ad hoc mobile networks by Dazhi Chen at Syracuse U.

Publications of this project:

Disclaimer: These papers are made available as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

2008

TCP Performance Enhancement in Wireless Environments: Prototyping in Linux, Swen Weiland, Bachelor's thesis, No. GAUG-ZFI-BSC-2008-05, Center of Computational Science, University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany, ISSN 1612-6793, May 2008.
Read abstract	PDF [504.7 kB]

Performance Evaluation of TCP Variants over UMTS Networks, Nikunj Modi, Master's thesis, No. GAUG-ZFI-MSC-2008-06, Zentrum fuer Informatik, Universitaet Goettingen, ISSN 1612-6793, May 2008.
Read abstract	PDF [763.9 kB]