TCP Network Coding with Enhanced Retransmission for heavy and bursty loss

抄録

In general, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), e.g., TCP NewReno, considers all losses to be a sign of congestion. It decreases the sending rate whenever a loss is detected. Integrating the network coding (NC) into protocol stack and making it cooperate with TCP (TCP/NC) would provide the benefit of masking packet losses in lossy networks, e.g., wireless networks. TCP/NC complements the packet loss recovery capability without retransmission at a sink by sending the redundant combination packets which are encoded at the source. However, TCP/NC is less effective under heavy and bursty loss which often occurs in fast fading channel because the retransmission mechanism of the TCP/NC entirely relies on the TCP layer. Our solution is TCP/NC with enhanced retransmission (TCP/NCwER), for which a new retransmission mechanism is developed to retransmit more than one lost packet quickly and efficiently, to allow encoding the retransmitted packets for reducing the repeated losses, and to handle the dependent combination packets for avoiding the decoding failure. We implement and test our proposal in Network Simulator 3. The results show that TCP/NCwER overcomes the deficiencies of the original TCP/NC and improves the TCP goodput under both random loss and burst loss channels.