Transport control protocols for the success of the Internet

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the most prevalently used transport protocol on the Internet. Most current network applications that require reliable transmission use TCP as their transport protocol. In this dissertation we discuss five important questions related to TCP: (1) Are other media streaming transport protocols on the Internet “TCP friendly”? (2) Is TCP suitable for multicasting on wireless networks? (3) Is there an easy to use benchmark to measure the throughput/transfer time of TCP on wired/wireless networks? (4) Is TCP suitable for mobile/wireless networks? (5) Is TCP suitable for the transfer of multimedia applications on wireless networks?; We present the design of an Internet friendly transport-level protocol (IFTP) for media streaming whose goal is to contribute to the good health of the Internet and avoid starving other good behaving protocols like TCP. We also derive tight upper bounds of the amount of throughput that IFTP may be able to claim from TCP. Our goal in designing IFTP is not only to have it TCP-friendly but also to maintain the QoS needed for most real-time multimedia applications.; We present the design of a new reliable multicast protocol for cellular wireless networks. Unlike conventional multicast protocols, our protocol takes advantage of the position-based nature of cellular wireless networks. We show the efficiency and reliability of our protocol through extensive simulations.; We develop another analytical model for the throughput and transfer time of ideal TCP. Our measurements demonstrate the accuracy of our model. We discuss various applications that can benefit from our model.; In this dissertation, we also present a study of the effect of bit error rates and handoff disconnections on the performance of standard TCP implementations. Our performance tests show that the performance of TCP is dominated by the length of the link-up period. We discuss how this result is very important to cell design. While SACK TCP is well known to perform better than Reno TCP in wired networks, we show that this is not usually the case in mobile networks.; Finally, we propose split TCP for the transfer of multimedia applications in networks with a wireless link.