Performance of TCP/UDP under Ad Hoc IEEE802.11

TL;DR

This paper evaluates TCP and UDP performance over IEEE802.11 ad hoc networks, revealing TCP's limitations for bulk transfer and UDP's suitability for real-time audio, with insights based on string and mesh topologies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of UDP and TCP interactions over IEEE802.11 ad hoc networks using different topologies.

Findings

IEEE802.11 ad hoc is inefficient for TCP bulk transfer.

UDP performs well for real-time audio traffic.

TCP struggles with bulk data transfer in ad hoc networks.

Abstract

TCP is the De facto standard for connection oriented transport layer protocol, while UDP is the De facto standard for transport layer protocol, which is used with real time traffic for audio and video. Although there have been many attempts to measure and analyze the performance of the TCP protocol in wireless networks, very few research was done on the UDP or the interaction between TCP and UDP traffic over the wireless link. In this paper, we tudy the performance of TCP and UDP over IEEE802.11 ad hoc network. We used two topologies, a string and a mesh topology. Our work indicates that IEEE802.11 as a ad-hoc network is not very suitable for bulk transfer using TCP. It also indicates that it is much better for real-time audio. Although one has to be careful here since real-time audio does require much less bandwidth than the wireless link bandwidth. Careful and detailed studies are needed to further clarify that issue.