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A Receiver-Centric Transport Protocol for Mobile Hosts with Heterogeneous Wireless Interfaces

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 February 2006

Abstract

Numerous transport protocols have been proposed in related work for use by mobile hosts over wireless environments. A common theme among the design of such protocols is that they specifically address the distinct characteristics of the last-hop wireless link, such as random wireless errors, round-trip time variations, blackouts, handoffs, etc. In this paper, we argue that due to the defining role played by the wireless link on a connection’s performance, locating the intelligence of a transport protocol at the mobile host that is adjacent to the wireless link can result in distinct performance advantages. To this end, we present a receiver-centric transport protocol called RCP (Reception Control Protocol) that is a TCP clone in its general behavior, but allows for better congestion control, loss recovery, and power management mechanisms compared to sender-centric approaches. More importantly, in the context of recent trends where mobile hosts are increasingly being equipped with multiple interfaces providing access to heterogeneous wireless networks, we show that a receiver-centric protocol such as RCP can enable a powerful and comprehensive transport layer solution for such multi-homed hosts. Specifically, we describe how RCP can be used to provide: (i) a scalable solution to support interface specific congestion control for a single active connection; (ii) seamless server migration capability during handoffs; and (iii) effective bandwidth aggregation when receiving data through multiple interfaces, either from one server, or from multiple replicated servers. We use both packet level simulations, and real Internet experiments to evaluate the proposed protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Kyu-Han Kim, Yujie Zhu & Raghupathy Sivakumar

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate Institute of Communication and Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.

    Hung-Yun Hsieh

Authors
  1. Kyu-Han Kim
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  2. Yujie Zhu
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  3. Raghupathy Sivakumar
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  4. Hung-Yun Hsieh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Raghupathy Sivakumar.

Additional information

In consideration of the typically prevalent server-client nature of traffic in the Internet, we term the protocol ‘receiver-centric’ although precisely it is the mobile host that drives the protocol operation. Note that in this paper, we define the sender and the receiver of a connection with respect to the direction of the data flow.

Hung-Yun Hsieh received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering at National Taiwan University as an Assistant Professor in August 2004. His research interests include wireless networks, mobile computing, and Internet protocols. E-mail: hungyun@ntu.edu.tw

Kyu-Han Kim is currently a Ph.D student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sicence at Univeristy of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He received his M.S. degree in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked in the GNAN Research Group under the guidance of Prof. Raghupathy Sivakumar. His main research interests are mobile computing, wireless networks, and network performance evaluation. E-mail: kyuhkim@eecs.umich.edu

Yujie Zhu received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from the Electrical Engineering Department of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1994 and 1997 respectively. After that she worked as a Network Engineer in ATM Network Management Center of China Telecom, Guangzhou Co. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the ECE department of Georgia Tech. Her research interest includes transport layer protocols, sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks. E-mail: zhuyujie@ece.gatech.edu

Raghupathy Sivakumar received the BE degree in Computer Science from Anna University, India, in 1996 and master’s and doctoral degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and 2000 respectively. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in August 2000. His research interests are in wireless network protocols, mobile computing, and network quality of service. E-mail: siva@ece.gatech.edu

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11276-006-7523-0.

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Kim, KH., Zhu, Y., Sivakumar, R. et al. A Receiver-Centric Transport Protocol for Mobile Hosts with Heterogeneous Wireless Interfaces. Wireless Netw 11, 363–382 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-005-1763-2

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