TCP-Forward: Fast and Reliable TCP Variant for Wireless Networks

TL;DR

TCP-Forward introduces a novel TCP variant using LT Codes to improve throughput and reduce decoding delay in wireless networks, addressing limitations of previous network coding approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes TCP-Forward, a new TCP variant that replaces random linear network coding with LT Codes to enhance performance in wireless networks.

Findings

TCP-Forward outperforms previous network coding-based TCP variants.

It reduces decoding delay compared to random linear network coding.

Provides reliable and efficient data transmission in lossy wireless environments.

Abstract

The congestion control algorithms in TCP may incur inferior performance in a lossy network context like wireless networks. Previous works have shown that random linear network coding can improve the throughput of TCP in such networks, although it introduces extra decoding delay at the destination. In this paper we try to alleviate the decoding delay by replacing random linear network coding with LT Codes. Due to the inherent difference between linear network coding and Fountain Codes, such replacement is not as simple as it sounds. We conquer some practical problems and come up with TCP-Forward, a new TCP variant which offers many properties that TCP as a streaming transport protocol should offer. Our performance evaluation shows TCP-Forward provides better performance than previous works.