A Proxy Acknowledgement Mechanism for TCP Variants in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A sequence number checking technique is proposed to improve the performance of TCP connections in mobile ad hoc networks. While a TCP connection is initialized, a routing protocol takes the responsibility for checking the hop count between a source and destination pair. If the hop count is greater than a predefined value, the routing protocol decides to use a proxy node. The responsibility of a proxy node is to check the correctness of data packets and inform the missing packets by sending an acknowledgement from a proxy node to the source node. By doing so, the source node is able to retransmit any missing packet in advance without waiting until an end-to-end acknowledgement is received from the destination. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is able to increase throughput up to 55% in static network and decrease routing overhead up to 95% in mobile network.