ATCP:: TCP for mobile ad hoc networks

Transport connections set up in wireless ad hoc networks are plagued by problems such as high bit error rates, frequent route changes, and partitions. If we run transmission control protocol (TCP) over such connections, the throughput of the connection is observed to be extremely poor because TCP treats lost or delayed acknowledgments as congestion. In this paper, we present an approach where we implement a thin layer between Internet protocol and standard TCP that corrects these problems and maintains high end-to-end TCP throughput. We have implemented our protocol in FreeBSD, and in this paper, we present results from extensive experimentation done in an ad hoc network. We show that our solution improves TCPs throughput by a factor of 23.