A Survey of TCP Reno, New Reno and Sack Over Mobile Ad-Hoc Network

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is often preferred to be implemented at the transport layer of a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) because of its wide range of applications, which enjoys the advantage of reliable data transmission in the Internet. However, because of some unique characteristics of MANET, TCP cannot offer reliable services while using e-mail, internet search and file transmission in such a network. The research investigates how well the different versions of TCP respond to various performance differentials when subjected to different network stresses and topology changes, aside from identifying the most efficient and robust TCP version(s) for different MANET scenarios. Among several TCP variants, three types are considered important for the analysis, namely TCP Reno, TCP New Reno and TCP Selective Acknowledgment (SACK). In most cases, the TCP performance is found in our study to decrease when the node size and mobility rate is increased in the network. There is, however, exception to this. As our simulation results demonstrate, the increases in the node velocity sometimes help the TCP to attain a better performance. The study also reveals that out of the three variants, TCP SACK can adapt relatively well to the changing network sizes while TCP Reno performs most robustly in the presence of different mobility rates within MANET.