Analyzing Buffer Requirement for Wireless Enhancement of TCP in Network Mobility
On-board TCP (obTCP) has been shown to address the dual wireless link related issues in network mobility (NEMO) effectively. obTCP uses agents at both base station (BS) and mobile router (MR). The agents store incoming TCP packet in a buffer for future possible retransmissions over the wireless links. Since the number of TCP connections passing through the MR could be very large, the amount of memory space required for the buffers may become very high. This may put the deployment of obTCP in question. So, in this paper, the authors investigate the buffer requirement problem of obTCP at MR for each TCP connection. For this purpose, they describe a Markov model to keep track of the packet transmission process of MR. The buffer size for each TCP connection is represented as a function of loss probability of the wireless links. Interestingly, from the numerical results, the authors find that the buffer size requirement at MR is significantly low for each TCP connections. This observation claims possible implementation of obTCP in NEMO.