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

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.