A network-based approach to improve TCP performance in wireless systems with opportunistic scheduling

As a highly efficient radio link technology, the opportunistic scheduling policy has been widely investigated and implemented. Therefore. new challenges come up in the case of TCP over opportunistic scheduling systems. In this paper we investigate the impact of wireless opportunistic scheduling on TCP throughput. It shows that the optimization of the wireless link mechanisms needs to be maintained at the transport layer by cooperation of the adjacent layers. We propose a new ACK Reservoir Method to smooth the TCP behavior combating against the spurious timeout caused by scheduling. Based on performance analysis and simulation results, the proposed method is shown to enhance the TCP throughput by up to 100% in the presence of opportunistic scheduling. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated in a practical simulation scenario of CDMA/HDR system.