Mobile Computing & Networking Research
The Mobile and Pervasive Computing Lab is focused on systems research and experimental aspects of Mobile Computing, emphasizing Mobile Computing Models, Mobile Data Access, Mobile Networking, and Power-Aware Mobile Computing. Individual projects are listed below.
Mobile Networking ❯ ILC-TCP: An Inter-Layer Collaboration Model for Improved TCP Performance in Mobile Networks
Overview
ILC-TCP stands for An Interlayer Collaboration Model for TCP Performance Improvement in Mobile and Wireless Environments. The performance of TCP, the de facto transport layer protocol, also degrades in rapid mobility environments. A good amount of research has been attempted to improve its performance in the unpredictable mobile and wireless environments where link disconnections, packets losses and delays are common. Most of these proposed solutions target the case where the mobile host acts as a TCP receiver. For various reasons, almost none of the solutions have reached the stage of deployment. We are working on slightly different approach. We have developed an Interlayer Collaboration Model and are working on an Interlayer Collaboration Protocol to improve TCP performance these environments. We call this protocol, ILC-TCP. We focus on optimizing the case where the mobile device acts as a TCP sender. We introduced a new management layer parallel to the existing network protocol stack of a mobile device. Currently, we have implemented the ILC-TCP protocol in the network stack of the ns-2 network simulator (our ns-2 snapshot with ILC-TCP changes). The performance of ILC-TCP is being compared with the standard TCP in various scenarios. Early results show that ILC-TCP performs much better than the standard TCP in environments involving frequent disconnections, long disconnections, and mobile environments where a mobile device is subjected to considerable speeds. We are also exploring the possibilities of extending the model to improve the performance of other network protocols such as Mobile IP in rapidly mobile environments.
People
Dr. Sumi Helal
Madhav Chinta
Publications
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M. Chinta and Sumi Helal " ILC-TCP: An Interlayer Collaboration Protocol for TCP Performance Improvement in Mobile and Wireless Environments," Proceedings of the Third IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), New Orleans, Louisiana, March 2003 (pdf).