Proposal for ENSC 833 Project

Ng, Chi-Ho 943013050 cng@SierraWireless.com

Chow, Jack Chi-Kit 933016571 jchowa@sfu.ca

Performance of TCP protocol running over WLAN 802.11 with Performance Enchancing Proxy (PEP):

With the heavy usage of the TCP/IP protocol on the Internet and the growing popularity of using wireless devices to access the Internet, it is expected that TCP protocol will be frequently used over the wireless link connecting the wireless devices in the near future.

The connection characteristics (e.g. bit error rate) of the wireless link are significantly different from that of a wired line network because data are frequently lost due to the volatile environment that a wireless link operates. TCP is originally targeted towards a wired system, which assumes any loss of data is caused by congestion. This assumption leads to poor performance of TCP over wireless link. Therefore, a number of mechanisms are proposed by various research groups to improve TCP performance over wireless link. Implementing a Performance Enchancing Proxy (PEP) is one of the ways that has been proposed to improve the TCP performance over wireless link.

The first phase of the project will evaluate the TCP performance over WLAN 802.11 network using OpNet. The second phase will implement the PEP mechanism. The third phase will compare improvement in the TCP performance over the WLAN 802.11 network achieved by the PEP mechanism.

References:

[1] IEEE 802.11 Workgroup

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/index.html

[2] Performance Enchancing Proxy (PEP) Request for Comments (RFC)

http://community.roxen.com/developers/idocs/drafts/draft-ietf-pilc-pep-04.html

[3] Improving TCP/IP Performance over Wireless Networks

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ss/papers/mobicom95/html/mobicom-final.html

[4] W.Richard Stevens, TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1, Addison Wesley, Professional Computing Series, 1984

[4] Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks Third Edition, Prentice-Hall Press, 1996